(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: main Chrononauts theme)
JM:
Hello, this is Chrononauts.
Yes, it is indeed, and I’m here, JM, with my lovely co-hosts Gretchen and Nate. And we are having Dangerous Visions. We’re getting on the "Dangerous Visions" express train. And yeah, we have lots of plans. We’re going to stick it to the man. We’re going to bust the taboos. We’re going to make all the Catholic boys and girls run to their confessors. We’re going to challenge God and your leaders and the law. And maybe we’ll even give a couple of the priests a hard-on.
But now we’re here to talk about "Dangerous Visions", quite an undertaking for us. But before we get into that, let’s take care of a couple of other things. So, of course, you can find us, a science fiction literature podcast called Chrononauts, on many of the best and greatest modern platforms, such as YouTube and Apple Podcasts and Google.
Nate:
And I actually don’t think Google Podcasts is a thing anymore.
JM:
Oh yeah, you’re right. It’s gone. Okay, never mind. You can find us there.
Gretchen:
Gone with the Golden Age.
JM:
Yeah, I can’t keep track. I don’t know. We’re everywhere, or almost everywhere. And we can be found at our Blogspot, where you can also read up on some of the stories that we’ve done in the past, as well as some new translations. We’re at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. And we can be reached by email, chrononautspodcast@gmail.com. And we basically invite you to come in and contact us and let us know what your favorite things are about what we’re doing, and also how much you like our lovely little skits and translations and things like that.
But now, I guess to start with, hopefully everything is going well for everybody. It’s summertime. It’s getting hot. I think last weekend, when I was taking somebody around, it was starting to feel like the summer solstice had passed us by. Now here we are. And I haven’t been reading much aside from short stories and things like that. I’ve only read one longer work, and that was "The Joke" by Milan Kundera, which I quite enjoyed. It was my first exposure to him. And yeah, it’s good to check out another Czech writer, this one from the 1960s. It’s lots of interesting, interesting talk about, I guess, both love and tradition. And I don’t know, it was pretty brutal at times, pretty funny at others, and some pointed things about the pointlessness of revenge and stuff like that. Other than that, well, just lots of short stories in between this book and some of the sequel and some of the authors that are especially new to me from these anthologies. I guess I’ve been mostly embroiled in that. How about you guys?
Gretchen:
I’ve got to say the same with regards to—I’ve been doing a lot of reading surrounding the authors that we’ll be talking about tonight, especially one of the ones that I have chosen, one of my picks. Definitely been reading a lot of sci-fi recently besides just short stories for this episode. I’ve also been reading a number of short stories just in different magazines that I’ve been finding on Internet Archive. I’ve also read a couple of new books for the sci-fi book club that I’m part of. I think the last one I had mentioned here that I had read was "This Is How You Lose the Time War", and that was for the April meeting that we had.
After that, we read "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov, which I enjoyed. It did not go down as well with some of the members. I think it’s not as character-driven. It’s a bit more vignette-like. It is, of course, Asimov compiling several short stories.
JM:
Yeah, I actually read "Foundation" after some of the other books, and I actually preferred the second one, "Foundation and Empire", quite a bit. I was quite young when I read all those for the first time, so I would like to revisit "Foundation", but I’ve actually revisited "Foundation and Empire" a couple times in my life. I quite enjoyed that one. I even had to think, when I was in my big Isaac Asimov phase, that I did find the first book a little bit on the dry side and not necessarily the most exciting thing, but I enjoyed those books for the most part. And it’s also been interesting coming back at them now, kind of talking about what we know about the work with Astounding Science Fiction and Campbell and stuff like that, and how much that might have influenced where he went with that.
Nate:
Yeah, I first read the first one in high school, and it didn’t really stick with me just because I thought it didn’t really work as a standalone novel. But now, getting into science fiction history, I realize that it is basically a fix-up of a whole bunch of stories that were originally published in Astounding, and that’s pretty cool. I think the series definitely works better not as being read as standalone novels, but, yeah, just a collection of short stories. And it would be cool to cover "The Mule" or something like that on the podcast. I’m not sure how much time we want to devote to those really, really popular Asimov stories where there’s probably a lot of people talking about them already, but you never know.
JM:
Yeah, I’d like to maybe bring in a couple more short stories, and maybe something like "The Caves of Steel", a science fiction detective novel, and I was kind of thinking doing something based on that theme would be pretty cool. Maybe I could do a couple of shorter works.
By the way, this work that we’re doing tonight is probably the longest single book that we’ve done on the podcast yet, I think so.
Nate:
I’m pretty sure it’s also the longest reading block of anything we’ve done in general, like even counting the early episodes. I think this is still a larger word count than "The Last Man".
JM:
Yeah, "The Last Man" was what I was thinking as well, but yeah.
Gretchen:
I would like to cover "The Caves of Steel" or something at some point, because I do have that, and I have "Foundation and Empire" on my reading list at this point. I would like to get to those.
After "Foundation", we ended up reading a book called "A Memory Called Empire" by Arkady Martine, which a lot of people in the group did like, and I thought it was really interesting. I chose it to be in conversation with "Foundation", as it also concerns empire and the decline, all of these crises happening within it. And I thought it was really a great work and explores colonialism in a really interesting way.
The next book that we’re talking about is "2001: A Space Odyssey", and I have started it. I’m about a third of the way through it. I’ve read through all of the Ascent of Man section with the beginning of the film, so that was really fun to read.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah, I like that novel a lot, and it just provides a really fascinating different viewpoint on the material of the film. They really complement each other quite well, even though they are different in some very crucial ways.
JM:
I read it a couple years ago, I think it was, maybe two or three years ago. I think I had gone to it a long, long time ago, but I barely remember. I guess it’s not fair, and I know he’s actually a lot better than that, but a part of me does sometimes feel a little resistant to reading Clarke. I think for a couple reasons, but maybe especially coming to the book "2061: Odyssey Three" as a younger person, and maybe, like, the Rama books and stuff like that, which I had on commercial audiobook when I was like ten or something. I struggled a little bit with certain parts of it. I think I’ve gotten over all that, and I can appreciate now what Clarke was doing.
The thing about "2001", too, is it feels like it just breezes by. I’d either forgotten that or I didn’t expect that or anything, but it was just like, yeah, it just flew by. So almost more chatty than I was expecting, and just sort of like telling you, like you wanted to listen to him, you know what I mean?
Gretchen:
Yeah. I read the entire beginning half of the film and the Ascent of Man scenes, which is, in my copy, about 40 or so pages. And I read it when I was just, like, at a café right before work. It went very quickly, and you’re right, it does breeze by really well. So I really think I’m going to be finishing that probably just in the next two sittings I have when reading through it. But yeah, I am enjoying it so far, and I’ve seen the film a couple of times, but this is my first time reading the book. So that’s most of the reading recently. It has really been taken over by "Dangerous Visions".
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah. Yeah, I definitely like "2001" a lot. The film’s an obvious masterpiece, and I thought "Rendezvous with Rama" and "Childhood’s End" were pretty cool too. But yeah, also been consumed with "Dangerous Visions" stuff for the month. I read a few of the stories multiple times just to kind of get a feel for them the second time around.
But I’ve also been reading some other stuff. So I read the seventh volume of the Richard Burton translation of the "Arabian Nights" that you can find on Project Gutenberg. It contains several longer works, more or less a novel-length continuation and conclusion of the story at the end of volume six. But the major standout here is a story involving this con artist woman named Dalilah the Wily, who is such a good bullshitter that she manages to talk her way out of being crucified while already up on the cross. That was a really amusing story, for sure, the adventures she gets in.
But after that I picked up a Tor Double, which has Leigh Brackett’s "The Nemesis from Terra" and Edmond Hamilton’s "Battle for the Stars".
JM:
Wow! Nice!
Nate:
Yeah. The Brackett has a convoluted publication history in that it was initially published in Startling Stories as "Shadow Over Mars" in 1944. And it was republished a couple times in standalone novel format and then retitled "The Nemesis from Terra" and published in an Ace Double with Robert Silverberg’s "Collision Course" in the ’60s. And then this Tor Double in the ’80s with Edmond Hamilton.
And the double format is really cool. It’s kind of gimmicky, where each side of the book has the text of the novel you’re reading—or I guess novelette or novella; they’re all shorter works—but it’s typeset so one half of the book is 180 degrees turned around from the other side of the book. So each novel starts with, like, the cover and the back cover. It’s kind of cool. It has two different covers, you know, one on each side for what the novels are. So that’s fun.
But it definitely feels like early Brackett. And while it’s not terribly long, it’s around, like, 40,000 words or so, it feels a little long for how simple it is. It’s very much more like the Planet Stories type of stuff she’d do in "Enchantress of Venus" rather than a space western like "No Man’s Land in Space".
JM:
And yeah, she wrote a lot of that stuff.
Nate:
Oh yeah.
JM:
Yeah, she started to diversify that stuff, but always, yeah, into that adventure style, Edgar Rice Burroughs. But yeah, I think we kind of all agreed that we preferred her style.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. So this one, I don’t know, it’s definitely much in that vein, for sure. But it feels pretty thin for the word count, and I didn’t think it was nearly as good as "Enchantress of Venus" was. It feels very much like early Brackett before she really honed her skills in doing this genre, or at least at this length. There’s a lot of scenes where the hero gets captured and escapes, which get a little bit repetitive. But overall, it’s definitely a pretty fun and fast-paced read.
JM:
It’s like that Jon Pertwee Doctor Who serial "Frontier in Space", where it’s like basically a tour of the galaxy via prison cells. It’s so epic, right? But they’re always in jail.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of that here. But there’s definitely some amazing pulp names, and lots of really ridiculous moments. But yeah, I get the feeling her later stuff—she gets better and better writing this stuff, or at least writing more at, like, a 20,000-ish-word length or so in shorter form.
And I’m about two-thirds of the way through the Edmond Hamilton side, which, from what I can tell, wasn’t published initially in any of the magazines; initially published in a standalone format in 1961, which is around 30 years into his writing career. And that’s pretty impressive anyway. I’m super into it so far. It’s not, like, a total earth-shattering masterpiece or anything, but just so far anyway, it’s a really tight space opera tinged with political intrigue. And you can tell by this point he’s just a total pro at writing this stuff, as it feels really natural and doesn’t have any of the clunkiness that you might find in a fledgling writer just first trying their hand at doing genre stuff.
JM:
Yeah, I haven’t read a lot of Hamilton, but my impression has always been like, yeah, it’s very race-ahead and go a little bit over the top at times, but mostly, like, spare and just kind of like, yeah, pure adventure, a little bit of weirdness, space opera. And they call him the planet smasher, right? Because he was blowing up planets and stuff.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely the threat here. So we’ll see if the planet actually gets blown up at the end of the novel or not. But yeah, it’s the first thing I’ve read by him and I’m super into it. I definitely want to bring some of the stuff on the podcast, probably starting with his ’20s stuff. I know we’ve floated around the idea of pairing him with some E. E. "Doc" Smith, so that will be interesting to compare and contrast his early stuff with his later stuff when we get to it, because he was writing for a good 40 years. And this is pretty close to that later period.
Certainly looking forward to finishing it, which I’ll probably do this weekend. Again, really, really fast-paced, and while longer than the Brackett, it isn’t very long at all. So yeah, that’s been what I’ve been up to, some good stuff, and we’ve got some good stuff for tonight.
"Dangerous Visions" background
JM:
More on the "Arabian Nights" in a little bit. Nate, maybe you can help me out, actually.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We’ll see. We’ll see.
Because that’s one piece of information that I didn’t really look much into. So I’d be curious to see. But anyway, we’ll get to that in quite a while.
But yeah, I do want to introduce "Dangerous Visions". Everybody knows what this is, I think, pretty much. We’ve talked about it before, even. It’s been getting some coverage lately among some of our fellow podcasters. I know the Wheel of Genre podcast talked about most of the stories, if not all of them in here, at one point.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
I know other podcast, Liminal Spaces YouTube channel has been talking about them on and off, but also a couple gave up partway through reading this anthology, which is interesting. And maybe we’ll talk about why as we go. There’s a really interesting piece, but kind of the bartering I was doing at the beginning—that’s kind of the style of the anthology. Yeah, I might have to slip into that personality a couple of times as we go.
Yeah, I mean, I think we can all agree it’s a mixed bag. But before we get into it, I’d like to say, yeah, I’m mostly feeling positive toward it. So if you’re looking for me to slam the shit out of this anthology, I’m not really going to do that. I get that there’s a lot of hectoring in it. There’s a lot of, like, Ellison just being Ellison, especially. And sometimes it’s a little disagreeable. Usually it’s—sometimes it’s not. I just wonder if he got into as many fistfights as is apparently the case. I don’t—I think it seems like it’s—but it’s true.
Nate:
It seems possible, I mean, based on his personality that comes through very, very strongly in his forewords to all the stories here, which are somewhat downright insulting in some cases. So I could definitely see a lot of people taking his comments the wrong way.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there are definitely a number of intros that—sometimes reading the intros could be almost as interesting as just reading the story itself, where it’s like, I’d love to know if Ellison is really joking here or if he’s being serious, or, you know, what the relationship really is with this writer.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I would like to get—I don’t know. I mean, again, this is not something—I’m not into tearing somebody down. So I think Ellison did a really interesting job of putting all this together. He does also sometimes have the air of a bullshitter, and I kind of wonder about some of the anecdotes really as described. They kind of make a joke out of the fact that he and Asimov remember their first meeting kind of differently.
And yeah, I mean, there’s other things, too, where there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding. And yeah, Ellison seems to be—well, I mean, not that their personalities are the same, but since they’re both connected to Star Trek, I can kind of say that Ellison gives off Shatner vibes sometimes in that.
Nate:
Yeah, I can see it, for sure.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, they’re very different, but what I mean by that is, like, sometimes he maybe doesn’t even realize that he’s doing something that’s putting people off. Like, he doesn’t seem to realize that there might be a reason why this person never answered him. He’s so unaware, so he’s pretty endearing about it, right, a lot of the time.
Gretchen:
Admittedly, I do find Ellison kind of endearing. I find him to be—I would be very intimidated to meet him in real life, but I think reading his work and reading the voice he has is very fun to read.
JM:
Yeah, I started reading Ellison in—well, the first story I read was "A Boy and His Dog", I think.
Nate:
Yeah, that was the first one I read, too.
JM:
Right. I don’t know, I’d been quite young. Then later came different things like "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", and there was that book that I think I mentioned when we talked about that story, "Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled". And I think that was his first short story collection or something like that. Pretty much none of it was science fiction. It was just, like, gritty 1950s American boy stories, kind of like—sometimes there were a couple that were, like, a little more horror-ish. I don’t know, reminded me a little bit of something—I mean, Fritz Leiber’s coming up later on, and I don’t know, I feel like maybe he was an influence on what some of Ellison was doing at certain points.
But anyway, so I’ve had some experience with him, too. And I guess, yeah, like, there are times when he’s pushing pretty hard, and I guess, like, we’ll get to that, too. He does have a story in this collection, so we’ll be talking about that briefly.
But yeah, before we actually get into the stories: the anthology was published in 1967, and this was put out by Doubleday in the United States. There were struggles to find an English publisher, but eventually one was found. But then, according to Ellison, the book struggled with censorship outside of the U.S., where different bits were cut out and different stories were removed. And in the U.S., supposedly, there were libraries that returned it.
He’s proud to have received an anti-fan letter basically saying what a horrible person he is for having put this anthology together. Some woman in Philadelphia—I’m sure it’s not her real name—and she just wrote in. She’s like, “You say you had a Jewish grandmother. Well, I bet she was Viet Cong. You should be ashamed of yourself. Science fiction should be beautiful.”
Nate:
Yeah, I’m sure he got a lot of negative pushback from some people on this, especially considering how widely it sold. I think the claim that it is the best-selling science fiction anthology still holds true. I’d actually have to check into that, but it was true at certainly one point in time. And I’m not sure if that’s one of those, like, meaningless statistics, like the Commodore 64 is still the best-selling model of computer of all time, even though, like, the landscape has totally changed with regards to science fiction anthology sales. But, you know, a lot of people have this out there.
So I could definitely see some of the stuff especially rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. And just the large numbers, large sales, would equal much greater negative feedback like that. So I’m kind of curious as to some of the other stuff that he got from offended readers and people who just did not like the contents of what is in here.
JM:
Yeah, well, I mean, as well as some offended readers, there’s maybe a couple of offended authors, and we’ll get into that as we go along.
And yeah, I mean, there’s a real legacy behind this. To go into it a bit, it seems like the idea of "Dangerous Visions" started out quite a few years before the actual publication. And Ellison had been doing some editing through the ’60s and apparently put out a couple of anthologies in the early ’60s where he kind of had the idea of "Dangerous Visions" already in his head. And he was looking for these particular stories that pushed them a little bit, but he said he was never satisfied with the results. And he would complain about this to his many friends.
And among those friends were Robert Silverberg and also Larry Niven. And essentially what it sounds like is that Robert Silverberg and some others essentially told him, well, if you’re looking for that kind of stuff, you should try and make it happen. And he wanted to make sure that essentially these stories were not published anywhere before. So he could go to these authors and be like, hey, just pull it all out, let it all hang out, give it to me, and just sock it to them hard, right? Like, that seems to be essentially what he was doing.
And you might say, oh, that sounds childish or something. But yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting to see how the different authors interpret this. And you can kind of say sometimes maybe his request is too vague. Maybe sometimes authors interpret it in interesting ways. Maybe they interpret it in stupid ways. Who knows? There’s 33 stories in here, so the variety and the scope is really, really something.
And just looking at both contemporary, but especially now, people talking about this anthology, a lot of them come down pretty hard on it, I’ll say that. And although I’m not going to really, except maybe for a couple of individual stories and maybe the odd silly thing that Ellison said, I can understand this.
But what I found really, really interesting—and Gretchen, I think you kind of said the same thing—was that when you look at the reviews of the stories that are a little more negative, they usually say something like, “Oh, I really didn’t like too many of these stories, but there were a couple that stood out.” And every time you see somebody say something like that, it’s always different stories that they mention. And I just thought that was really interesting. It just goes to show, I mean, there’s some really good-quality stories in here, but there’s also stories that, for one reason or another, might still challenge somebody, right?
And so what it looks like is that Ellison contacted his agent at Doubleday, who was Lawrence Ashmead. He liked the sound of the anthology, but he wasn’t willing to be—well, he said he was willing, but he wasn’t going to be able to raise the kind of funds that were necessary to pay a whole bunch of authors for basically original, completely original stories. And Ellison wanted the highest going rate in the genre magazines, but also, yeah, exclusive rights, and there were going to be 32 authors in here, which is a lot.
And it was going to be the largest science fiction anthology published up to that time. I’m not 100 percent sure if it is. There were certain things like the old "Omnibus of Science Fiction" that I think were pretty large, but I think it’s probably up there. But it’s also gotten its citation from the World Science Fiction Convention, calling it the most important and controversial science fiction anthology of all time. And it’s been considered to be a definition of the New Wave, a term which Ellison doesn’t really seem very enamored of, doesn’t like it.
And yeah, he tells us all about every aspect of the process of putting this thing together and dealing with the authors and dealing with the publishers. And I would say that the Ellisonia is definitely part of the experience.
Nate:
Yeah. His personality certainly comes through.
JM:
If you really want to get the full time-capsule experience of "Dangerous Visions", you have to read Ellison’s introductions. And yeah, they are sometimes a little much. He likes to talk, he likes to talk about himself, he likes to praise his friends, too. And yeah, I mean, he’s funny a lot of the time, so I think that helps. And if you know what he talks like, you can kind of hear his voice in your head.
So yeah, go look up on YouTube. There’s a couple of interviews. I also have a radio broadcast of a Gerald Kersh story done on NPR where he actually acts in it, and that was really fun. So he’s doing a silly German accent playing this crazy scientist—or wait, I think it’s supposed to be a French accent now that I think about it. Yeah, it’s really over the top. It’s hilarious.
But yeah, so in the end there wasn’t quite enough money, so he actually contacted his friend Larry Niven. And I don’t know a ton about Niven, but from what Ellison was hinting at—again, don’t know how much is bullshit, how much is an inside joke some of the time—but he seems to suggest that Larry Niven has a lot of, like, money lying around that he can just use for whatever.
Larry Niven fronted about 750 bucks to help get this thing out. In the end, they were able to put it out. And, well, the original printing was in a single volume. It was soon, in Ellison’s words, “vivisected,” and you could get it in three volumes. And they came out in ’69. Each one has its own introduction, so yeah, you get more Ellison out of that.
Nate:
He’s certainly very detailed about the publication process itself, going into all the ins and the outs of how the story actually got to where it was actually published, which is pretty cool to read. Again, I mean, I can see people being turned off by how chatty he is. And he does come off as being arrogant and very full of himself. But yeah, just as a time capsule, just looking at it as a snapshot of what the publishing industry was like at the time in the science fiction market, it’s just fascinating to read all the little twists and turns that this stuff takes.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
I do enjoy Ellison illuminating the readers as to all the challenges of him trying to create this anthology. The version I have, which is from SF Masterworks, does have an updated introduction from, like, 2002 from Ellison.
JM:
I thought I had that edition, but I don’t, and so I wasn’t able to read any of the really updated ones.
Nate:
Yeah. How I consumed the book initially was the audiobook version of the recent J. Michael Straczynski edition of it, which has even more intros than the 35th Anniversary Edition. So there’s, like, five or six different introductions to the book, which, I mean, it’s all cool reading people like JMS and Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison talk about it twice. And then the Asimov intro to the collection is just fantastic.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So I had that one. I was able to read the Ellison introduction, two Asimov forewords.
Yeah. But I didn’t read anything from Moorcock for this episode.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the 2002 Ellison introduction is kind of Ellison doing a bit of a victory round. Kind of just him being like, well, I did it, and it’s been several decades, and it’s still, like, the most widely selling of sci-fi anthologies. But I mean, I kind of understand why he would do that. I still think this is a really incredible undertaking, so I do understand Ellison’s maybe arrogance when it comes to this project after all of the hardships you’ve learned he had to go through to get it done.
Nate:
He does congratulate himself a lot and basically says that he single-handedly changed the face of science fiction, which you have to take with a grain of salt. But it is still kind of fun just reflecting on its legacy and all the people that it touched, because between this and "Again, Dangerous Visions", it touched upon a lot of major science fiction authors both from this time and from the earlier pulp days. So again, that’s just fascinating, too, that he pretty much brought everybody in for this.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, it is something.
So briefly, you can find all this online, but there is a second "Dangerous Visions". It’s "Again, Dangerous Visions", and that was published in 1972. And it’s actually, I think, a little bigger than this one.
And Ellison seems to think—yeah, okay. So—and Ellison seems to think, oh, these are even more dangerous. These are, like, super-dangerous visions. I won’t talk about them too much because, yeah, we’re not doing that one. But I did read through a number of the stories in that, and yeah, there’s a number of really good authors in that one too.
And I think Ellison does a really good job in both collections of recognizing both newer and older writers in the genre. And a really interesting thing that I noted from him is that he seemed—and this is what he says, anyway—he says that he really encouraged a lot of the older writers to try to contribute. And he said he wanted to do that because he wanted to dispel this notion that there’s this distinct divide between the new and the old guard of science fiction writers, that he wanted to kind of, like—and I respect that. And I think that’s really good.
He did say he was disappointed with the results and that a lot of the older ones didn’t seem to be interested, or they kind of, like, said, yeah, I’m a square. I mean, Asimov’s like, “I’m a square. Can I just write the foreword?”
Like, I mean, he makes a big deal of Ross Rocklynne being in "Again, Dangerous Visions". And he’s like, look at this guy, he’s almost 60 years old, and he’s, like, crazy, and he’s contributing to my anthology. And he’s a big manly man, and he actually lives with his younger sons in some, like, San Francisco commune now and gets into rock and roll and, like, Bob Dylan and stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, his name is Ross Rocklynne, so it makes perfect sense.
Gretchen:
I had him pegged wrong after reading "The Moth". Maybe I should read some more of Rocklynne.
Nate:
That was, like, 35 years prior to that, too. It was kind of crazy, again, how long of a career some of these people had.
JM:
So the big fiasco, though, is the third "Dangerous Visions" anthology. And that was always going to be "The Last Dangerous Visions". And according to Ellison, it was going to come out not much more than a year after "Again, Dangerous Visions". And he hyped it up so much. And even in, I believe it was the introduction to "Again, Dangerous Visions", he talks about all the writers who are going to be in the third book and how it’s going to be so great and amazing. But he was never able to do it.
And as late as 1979, he was posting tables of contents in fanzines and stuff that people could read, just to get them all hyped up. Well, some of the authors were not very happy with the fact that this book never came out. And although, I guess, he did pay a good number of them, because he actually bought their work from them, they couldn’t put their work out until that was released because they had officially sold him the work. So he was holding on to it.
I mean, I guess at least he did pay them. But I’m not saying they’re in the wrong because, yeah, I mean, obviously, if you put some work into something and you wanted it to be out there, of course, why wouldn’t you fight to get it released and stuff like that?
Nate:
Yeah. And the vast majority of those stories are still unpublished too, which kind of sucks.
JM:
Right, right. This book did come out posthumously, much, much truncated and featuring some newer authors as well. So you mentioned J. Michael Straczynski earlier, and yeah, he’s the one responsible for finally getting "The Last Dangerous Visions" out there well over 40 years, I think, 45 years after it was supposed to.
Nate:
Something like that.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. So quite remarkable, really. But the contents of vintage writers is definitely a mere shadow of some of the things Ellison led us to believe were going to be in there. So I don’t really know what happened with all that.
It seems like some writers, especially the British writers like Christopher Priest, were very displeased with this, and they actually published a necrology of all the dead writers whose work was apparently, like, gone missing forever because Ellison was holding on to it. So Priest put out this big long thing detailing the struggle with getting this thing—like, what was happening with this.
Ellison made some claims that the book was almost ready for publication when it clearly wasn’t. So again, I don’t know what the real story is. I mean, I’m sure people asked him about this later on, whether maybe he was very cagey about it. There was a struggle to get a book like this out. I mean, I guess maybe Lawrence Ashmead wasn’t around anymore, and just the interest wasn’t there. And from what this was sounding like, his idea was it was going to be bigger than the second one. And the second one is bigger than the first one. So to undertake such a huge project—I guess, I don’t know, third time wasn’t the charm in this case. It just didn’t happen.
Nate:
Yeah, well, the stories are going to enter the public domain in about 45 years, which is the amount of time between the initial planned publication of the anthology and the J. Michael Straczynski one. So maybe sometime in the future we’ll get the full "The Last Dangerous Visions" at some point. But I think it looks like we’re going to have to wait pretty much that amount of time for any of those stories to come out, as I don’t think anybody at the Ellison estate is rushing to bootleg them on the fan market anytime soon.
JM:
Yeah, an interesting thing about the direction this took—I mean, even just looking at that contents for the third volume, it’s pretty insane, the kind of things he had lined up, including some full novels and everything like that. Some of them, I don’t think—I don’t know, like, was he just making them up? Did they even exist at all? They’ve never been published anywhere. I don’t know. It’s just really strange.
We’re talking about the first "Dangerous Visions", of course, published in ’67. And this was really an experience. I’m going to say right now, I had a lot of fun with this. I enjoyed the overall process, even if not every story was a winner. And I think a lot of them were, actually.
And I think we’re going to tackle this in an interesting way. And my idea is basically that we look at—okay, we’ve got 33 stories to get through here. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on a few of them a little more than the others, but we’re going to go through the book in order, skipping some of the Ellison talk. But if it comes up, it comes up, right? I think we’ve already gone on about this enough.
But as we go through, I want us to talk briefly about each one. And we’re going to do what is the favorite activity of gamers everywhere on the internet now, apparently, and tier rank things.
So my idea is basically very simple. An A story is a story that we really like that will stick with us, like, for a long time, or if not forever. A B story is a story that we respect, but maybe we don’t love it. Maybe we respect it more than we like it. It’s up for debate whether a C actually should be lower than a B, but my reasoning behind this is thus.
So personally, I don’t hate any of the stories on here where it seems like they’re trying. I honestly feel like if a writer seems like they’re really, really trying, then even if the story is not maybe, like, something personally 100 percent to my taste, I think it’s worthy. I think the worst stories on here—and I mean, not just here, but maybe this is a universal experience—but the worst stories are where it just seems like nobody gives a shit, especially the author, right? That, to me, is a lot worse than, like, something that’s trying to do something cool and, yeah, maybe not quite getting there. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s going to come off in my enjoyment too. Like, if the author puts in a legitimate effort and you can see that they’re trying something, not just shuffling something off, that’s obviously going to come off greater. So that would definitely factor into my ranking anyway, of just, like, my personal enjoyment of the story. I don’t know if there’s a need to, you know, split it off into a way that’s more complicated than A, B, C. How many are we doing? Are we doing, like, A, B, C, D, F?
JM:
No, just D.
Well, I know with D, so—
Nate:
Okay, so four categories.
JM:
C is, like, a story that is maybe cool, but it’s kind of forgettable. Maybe it’s not that great. Maybe it’s, like, kind of just, oh, okay, well, I read that. Like, that’s all right. So C is kind of a nothing story, I guess, in a sense. But I did like some of the C stories kind of enough.
But a D story—that is, yes, D as in “damn it”—a D story is one we really didn’t like, that we don’t really think has redeeming qualities. So only four tiers. And we don’t have to worry about a limit on the number of stories that fit in each one, because that’s an artificial limitation that doesn’t matter here. But I just think that’s a little better in this case than, “Let’s rate the stories out of ten,” or something like that. Like, I just—I don’t know. It seems to work better in this particular case, so—
Nate:
Sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I’ll keep track of the ratings in case that information is useful at some point in the episode.
JM:
Okay, yeah, cool. And as well as that, I want us to add in by asking the question: how is it a dangerous vision? So can we answer that question? Can we perceive how it might be a dangerous vision?
And the other thing I want us to look at when we answer that question is: is it a dangerous vision in 1967 and now? Or is it no longer a dangerous vision? I mean, I do think that, yeah, again, looking at, for example, Goodreads, where a lot of people have reviewed this, I do think people sometimes lean heavily into the fact that so many stories are dated to the 1960s. And I personally don’t think that that’s a bad thing, but they may have a point in certain instances.
And so I’m wondering: do we think this story still is as effective? Maybe it’s even more effective. Who knows, right? As a dangerous vision, I’m saying. So yeah, how we feel about the story is certainly important. How we feel it’s a dangerous vision, I think, in this context is also important.
So we’ve got 33 stories to get through, guys. So let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back and start the book.
Lester del Rey - "Evensong"
JM:
And we’re back. And we’re about to tackle this.
So I think we had a really interesting experience going through these. It’s kind of hard to read all these all at once. I don’t know what you guys think, but in general, with anthologies—they’re among my favorite things, short-story collections—but I do dip in and out quite a lot. I think sometimes, especially these early stories, I feel like it is a little front-loaded with the shocking content, although there’s some in the back half too. But it feels like he was trying to do that on purpose. What do you guys think?
Nate:
It’s definitely plausible. I mean, he obviously had to think about the order that he’s putting the stories in, so I think he knew what he was doing, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I can imagine Ellison wanting to get that initial shock, that being the first impression people had of the anthology. I can see that being a point he would want to make.
I’ve got to say that I also really enjoy reading anthologies. I’m glad, though, that we did have a little more time to look back on this one, because I read this straight through very quickly. And so I think I was a lot harsher to some of the stories when I first came away from them, or had very different opinions than I do now. I feel like having a little more time to have digested some of these stories really helped me see them in a better light than I think I did the first time.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree. And yeah, I was the same, where I tore through this about, I don’t know, two months ago now. So just having a little bit more time to digest the stories, you know, how they fit in the anthology, what they’re trying to say for the time—and in some cases rereading them—was very good to do, I think. Some of these hold up really, really well on a second read. So that’s pretty cool.
JM:
Yeah, in my case, some of these stories I’d read before, not in "Dangerous Visions". So they were published later on in a lot of places. So I think probably a good quarter of these stories I had read already, maybe even half of them.
Now, when I came to this the first time—so I actually started to read this collection, I think it was about a year and a half ago now, maybe two years ago. And I was starting to read the early stories, and I thought, you know what? I’d like to do this on Chrononauts at some point, because it seems really important. And I had actually skipped around a little bit at that point, but I kind of stopped after Volume 1.
Now, there are certain stories, like the Fritz Leiber and Delany, and a couple of others, that I had read elsewhere a long time ago, or maybe in some cases a little more recently. The Leiber I was very familiar with because, yeah, some people consider it one of his best stories, and it did win the Hugo, I believe—or was it the Nebula?
Nate:
It was both. Yeah. This is the only one that I read before going into the anthology. And it’s the one that leads off "The Best of Fritz Leiber" anthology that I have, so I think somebody else felt it was the best one too over there.
JM:
Yeah. For this episode, coming back to it, I came back to the anthology and just read it all, including rereading the stories that weren’t new to me. But a couple of the ones that were new to me I didn’t reread, because, yeah, one of the most interesting things too about anthologies like this is that you discover authors who are new to you.
And I made a couple discoveries, one of which we won’t talk about for a long time, and I’ve been saving just talking about how cool I think this story is. But it’s not actually one we’re going to spend a crapload of time on, because it was just really hard to pick just a few stories to really focus in on here.
But why don’t we get started with the first one?
So we’re actually starting with "Evensong" by Lester del Rey. And Lester is definitely one of the few cases of Ellison succeeding at getting one of the very old guard to contribute to the anthology. And I think it was a good idea to have Lester open the anthology.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So one of the, I guess, figures up for various kinds of dissection in this anthology is religion. And as a whole, I do think that the stories that are talking about religion are maybe not the strongest in the anthology. I think even something like "A Canticle for Leibowitz", published in the ’50s, does a better job of talking about that than some of the stories in here do.
Again, maybe it takes an insider to know and to write about it. And it also could be me as an outsider. It could be I’m kind of struggling a little bit with these stories because I feel like, all right, yeah, when I was a little kid, I kind of grew up with my Catholic upbringing there. Didn’t take me very long to put it aside. And it’s kind of, I guess, now I’m not sure. I mean, I love satanic heavy metal and stuff like that. At the same time, I’m just, like, not really moved by some of these stories the way I think I’m supposed to be.
Nate:
Yeah, a lot of them do feel immature.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I guess this is an unfortunate thing, because there’s certainly criticisms to be made and ways to do it. But I just don’t think these authors, for the most part, have the skills or really the format or the venue to do that here. I think that just by the nature of these stories, they’re just going to come off trying to be edgy.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I think the opener is kind of the least guilty of that, perhaps. I don’t know. Like, I didn’t really mind it. It wasn’t, like, my favorite-favorite either, but I didn’t, like, groan like I did with some of the others.
JM:
Okay. So I think this was a pretty nice way to start off the anthology, though. Looking forward to the final question: is this a dangerous vision? No, I don’t really think it’s a dangerous vision. But at the same time, as a prologue for the anthology "Dangerous Visions", after all the forewords and introductions and everything, like an actual fictional prologue to "Dangerous Visions"—yeah, it’s kind of cool.
It has a melancholy feel to it, which I think some of the more focused stories in the anthology also have, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
I think those are some of the most effective stories, the stories that bring you this emotion of melancholy, not just anger. But, like, there’s a lot of anger in the book, but there’s a couple of surprisingly emotional moments delivered by a couple of the authors. And so, I don’t know, I think this was a nice way to start it off.
It’s kind of like—I don’t know, when we talk about PKD in a little while, I’m going to bring up something that he did, which is kind of funny, I guess. And I guess, like, I kind of wondered how much he actually read this entire anthology. Like, did he read all of it? Maybe? I don’t know. Maybe he just focused on certain stories.
Like, this story wasn’t particularly violent or blasphemous or anything like that. It is just like these—I guess it’s been, like, some kind of space conflict, and they’re looking for this alien. And he kind of seems really powerful, but he’s, like, hiding. And it kind of reminds me of van Vogt and one of these weird aliens that he talks about. He kind of likes to give you their perspective and how they have all these abilities, but they’re, like, afraid of the man-things because they’re doing something.
They have something, and this alien has to hide. And it wants to—maybe it wants to destroy them. Maybe it’s really tired. This being seems old and tired and just wants to hide somewhere and be safe. And these people keep chasing it. And at the end of the story, you find out that the being is God, and they’re capturing God. And they’re going to take God—what are they going to do? Are they going to put God on trial for war crimes? I don’t know.
So it’s kind of ambiguous. And yeah, it was kind of cool. I don’t know. I would say—I don’t know, I guess this is a C story, but, like, leaning towards a positive C story. Like, it’s a good way to start it, but it does feel maybe not so consequential like some of the other stories of this type.
Nate:
Yeah, I don’t know. I’d give it a B. I get what it’s trying to do. I think it could have had some more space to expand on some of these thoughts. It does kind of feel like the personification of the age-old argument that society is throwing away religion. And this seems very much more like an allegory for that idea that you still hear kind of in some spaces more prevalent than others.
But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t mind the critique. I don’t think he did make any major, like, missteps here, but it does feel like a little bit brief for what he’s trying to say. And I think certainly it could have been expanded out a little more. And that’s kind of one of the few stories that I think that I would like to see in a longer form in this anthology.
JM:
So that’s really interesting because I’m going to say that about the next story, but I didn’t necessarily feel that about this one. I kind of felt like the style wouldn’t have sustained something longer. I felt like it was kind of dreamy the way it was, and I appreciated it that way. I don’t know if I wanted more necessarily.
I think the next story that we’re going to talk about, I definitely wanted more because it was frustrating the way it was written. This one, I’m not sure I really agree with you on that, Nate. What do you think, Gretchen?
Gretchen:
I would also probably give this story a B. I think that it kind of works for the length. I feel like we do have the revelation of this character as God, which could be very obvious from the beginning, or has the implication right from when we start the story. And I like that it isn’t too drawn out.
I feel like the other religious stories kind of fall flat compared to this one because I think this one does have, as you said, Nate, more allegorical potential. And I think that even the fact that this is the beginning of our anthology, with a Golden Age writer writing about the new revolution of writing that Ellison wants—Ellison saying this is the revolution—to have this story be about this traditional figure being taken over by the new, by these modern men, I think that really adds an impact to the story that the others don’t.
Nate:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way. But now that you say it, that makes total sense.
JM:
Yeah. So I didn’t really say too much about Lester, but yeah, he was around for quite a while. He got his start in the late ’30s. I remember his story "Helen O’Loy", from 1938. It was one of the stories that we ended up reading in my science fiction class, and it was about a woman automaton robot. Again, this is kind of an interesting story.
And he wrote some other stuff in the ’40s. He was definitely part of the Campbell stable, part of the so-called Golden Age period. And I believe he wrote for Unknown as well as Astounding. And of course Del Rey Books, I think, is named after him, so that’s kind of cool.
Nate:
Yeah, I’ve never actually read anything by him before this, but I have those Del Rey publisher "Best of" collections, including "The Best of Fritz Leiber" one that I mentioned earlier. But I also have the Hal Clement one. He’s got a bunch out there. And I’ve definitely encountered more of those than his actual stories themselves.
Gretchen:
Yeah, same with me. This is the first time I’ve ever read Lester del Rey, encountered him as a writer rather than in the publishing sense.
Robert Silverberg - "Flies"
JM:
Well, let’s keep the train moving, then. Our next author is Robert Silverberg, and this is a story called "Flies". It’s inspired by a line from "King Lear" about how we are as flies to God.
And yeah, Robert Silverberg—I’ve read a lot of Robert Silverberg over the years, and by no means all his stuff. Interesting career. Started out in the ’50s, crazy adventure writer in sci-fi, and took a little break and came back a little more serious, a little more heavy. The contrast between his really early stuff and, I guess, like the early ’60s maybe and onwards, especially the ’70s, is quite startling. But he’s a very, very prolific author.
Nate:
I’ve only read one of his things before this, which appears in the "World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970" anthology, which was the one done by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim. But he had a story in there, "After the Myths Went Home", that I read long before we started the podcast. And I remember not really liking it that much, but it would be interesting to revisit now that we’ve just done all this podcast stuff. And I’d probably view it in a much different light, along with all the other stories that I read in that anthology.
Gretchen:
Yeah, despite the fact that I do have a copy of his book "Dying Inside", I have not yet read Silverberg. So this was really my first exposure to his writing.
JM:
Interesting. I guess my history with Silverberg goes really far back because he also published some kind of juvenilia. And after Isaac Asimov died, he actually took over the editorial of Asimov’s Science Fiction, so he wrote a lot of opinion pieces. I read a lot of opinion pieces about science fiction. Seems to know a lot about history. Yeah, really prolific and interesting.
Now, sometimes in his work, I did notice that—I guess I noticed this a lot as a very young person reading some of his work—but there just had to be weird sex stuff. And I think maybe we should have the weird sex stuff alert for some of the stories in this anthology, because that’s definitely a thing, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, for sure.
JM:
Yeah. So this story is very violent. I guess it’s not really, like, explicit. And I mean, it could be worse.
Nate:
It’s more cruel than gory.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, it’s very cruel. Briefly, the plot of the story: this astronaut goes into space, and it’s kind of like one of these Quatermass-type situations where the aliens take the astronaut. He’s almost dead, but they fix him up. And they do all this stuff to him.
Nate:
And yeah, this part is actually, like, really, really cool. I really liked this going in. I was like, oh, where is this going to lead? And then it, like, led where it does, and it’s like, oh, okay, never mind.
JM:
So this story needed to be a lot longer. This story needed to have more meat on it. And as it is, the thing you will remember most about this story is the shocking violence against women. And, like, why? Like, I don’t know. This is a really cool concept.
JM:
As it is right now I don’t even know if this guy was always such an asshole, or if he became that way after the aliens messed with him. Like, it’s kind of hinted that the aliens are not responsible, and that they kind of don’t approve at the end. But it’s, like, never made clear, right?
So it’s like, I don’t know, this could have been a really cool sci-fi thriller. It could have been, like, this guy came back, he tries to adjust to normal society, he can’t do it, and he keeps revisiting his ex-girlfriends. And eventually he does all this violent stuff, and he’s like, here, take this, let me show you these emotions. And he’s, like—because he knows the aliens are always listening to everything he’s doing.
It’s such a cool concept. But just the way it’s delivered here, it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. It’s not very satisfying.
Nate:
No, it feels more like an excuse to indulge than anything else.
Gretchen:
Reading all of these stories, as I said, like, in order really quickly, this is the story where you see some of the other stories of, like, just misanthropic for the sake of it. It’s that edginess that comes through of, like, I’m going to throw this shocking violence at you and be like, this is what humanity is. Kind of, we live in a society, and this is what we do.
I also thought that from the beginning of this story, the concept of it and this introduction was really cool. It had a lot of potential. But I feel like as soon as the introduction of the wives came in, you kind of see the direction it’s probably going to go. And I was kind of left pretty disappointed.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree. I think more could have been done with the actual concept itself other than what happens here. It just doesn’t need to be excessive violence against women, which basically, you know, it’s what he wrote.
And it feels very much like that Women in Refrigerators trope, even though he doesn’t actually kill any of them. He wounds them in a very, very cruel way.
Gretchen:
It’s more that he just kind of ruins their lives.
It’s very much like, like you said, cruel. It’s, like, the best word for it, where it’s not killing or even severely maiming these women. It’s just making sure that they are emotionally miserable and hurt.
Nate:
Right. And the only point of the story is to ultimately make him feel bad.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Right. If you’re not even going to give us that emotional aspect, why even bother, right?
There’s two ways of looking at this. Either the guy was always, like, unhinged and unbalanced, and that’s why his three wives ended up leaving him eventually, or this is like "We Purchased People", right? That story was kind of similar in a way. It felt like there was a lot more to that, a lot more building of the world around it. It actually sold itself better as a horror story too than this one did, I think, even though the violence in the end is only about one person.
So you could say, well, it’s not as bad, I guess, but I don’t know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think that maybe comparing it, "We Purchased People" speaks of this systemic change. And I think even the fact that it is such a broad-scale alteration in that world, I think makes it scarier and makes it feel there’s more being said than what is being said here by Silverberg.
JM:
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a shame. Like, this could have been pretty awesome. I think—I don’t know, who knows, maybe Pohl was influenced by this when he wrote the other story. I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to look at this a little differently.
There’s so many questions I have. Who was in control of this? I guess it was him the whole time. I guess it was him, but he can read people’s emotions more intimately now. Like, it didn’t explore him going around realizing that he now had this ability. And how can he, like, use it? How can he take advantage of it? It’s just—yeah, I definitely need more to justify what was going on in this story.
So to me—again, it’s that question, is it B, B and C, right? Like, okay, to me this is kind of, like, the ultimate B story. Like, I kind of respect what he was trying to do, but I just feel like this was not the right way to do it. This was a waste of the opportunity to make this concept.
And maybe just having a story in "Dangerous Visions" was that important to him, because apparently Silverberg was one of the instigators who pushed Ellison into actually getting this done. So maybe just him wanting a story in there was more important.
And I guess, again, there’s a lot of Silverberg I haven’t read, and maybe he explores these concepts a little more thoroughly somewhere else and I’m not aware of it.
Nate:
Yeah, this is a C for me. I don’t think the problem is that it needs to go into more detail about what’s happening here. I think the problem for me is it just goes in a direction that I don’t like about a quarter of the way through. So if it didn’t do that and he explored something else, it’d be better, because I do like the introduction of the setup. But where it went, I don’t really like.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I might have to give this a C as well. Because again, I do think that the initial concept, the very beginning of the story, is really strong, but I think that the rest of the story is just too much of, like, a letdown for me to call it a B, especially thinking of these other stories that’ll be coming up that I’ll probably put into the B tier that I actually really like a lot more than this. I think I’d have to put this in C.
JM:
All right. That’s fair.
And as for this being a dangerous vision, I guess a little bit. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. This is kind of making me think we should have a grading system on the dangerous-vision scale, but whatever. This is getting too meticulous.
I guess I can see how it’s somewhat of a dangerous vision. I guess it’s frightening to think what could happen to people who come back who have been contacted by aliens that we might not even know, right? Maybe alien contact will take a very different form than we suppose.
But again, "We Purchased People", I think, was a more scary and interesting way of looking at that, so yeah, through colonialism and basically robbing people of autonomy and stuff like that.
Frederik Pohl - "The Day After the Day the Martians Came"
JM:
But speaking of Pohl, he’s next. So actually, we have a Pohl story called "The Day After the Day the Martians Came". And yeah, short story, very relaxed and easygoing in the Pohl style. I liked it. I thought this was pretty effective for saying what it wanted to say, and I enjoyed the kind of lighthearted way of tackling a sort of heavy subject.
And it reminded me of some things. Quite some years ago I was hanging out with some people, and I was hanging out with a friend, and I don’t know, maybe we were drunk. I don’t remember exactly how this came up. But he said to me, “Yeah, what we need is a good alien invasion so that way everybody can just band together and people won’t hate each other anymore because now we’ll have aliens to hate.”
And there is an "Outer Limits" episode kind of about this as well. And in that one, these scientists thought the same thing, and they’re like, well, why don’t we, like, turn this guy into this disgusting, horrible alien?
And it’s not one of my favorite episodes. It’s actually like, doesn’t anybody see how bad an idea this is? Like, doesn’t anybody—like, what could possibly go wrong with this stupid idea, right? I don’t know. Some people really like the episode. It’s called "The Architects of Fear". I’m a fan of the series, but I don’t think everything in it was a hit necessarily.
So I don’t know. I just kind of feel like it obviously doesn’t solve the xenophobia problem, right? So it’s kind of an uncomfortable truth. I think actually this story still qualifies as a dangerous vision, because I’m actually surprised that not more of the stories in the book address these kinds of things.
And I think Pohl is one of the few writers to actually do this. And it’s the 1960s, and it seems very, very relevant. So I kind of feel like Pohl’s ahead of the game here a little bit, to be honest.
Gretchen:
I feel very similarly that this is, for the time especially, a dangerous vision. And I think, yeah, I think it holds up today, especially the way that this story tackles the intersection between, like, humor and sort of, like, people who are oppressed and prejudice.
I thought that that was really well done. I like the way that Pohl exposes how prejudices move from one group to another when they become, like, a certain scapegoat, or someone that, as you were saying, JM, about that idea of banding together against a certain group of people—or, in this case, a certain species. And I really enjoyed this one.
Nate:
Yeah, lighthearted commentary on racism. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I don’t really have a lot to say about it beyond what you guys have said. I largely echo your comments and sentiments. But yeah, I’d put this in the B range. It’s not, like, a total masterpiece for me, but I think Pohl’s got an easygoing style, especially here. And he is able to tackle what is a heavy subject still in the 1960s, still today, in a way that both says something and is easy to read.
JM:
Yeah, like, this has not gone anywhere, right? Some people like to say a lot of things are different now and, like, things have changed and stuff like that. I don’t know, man. I kind of feel like we haven’t progressed as far in this area as one would have hoped back in the ’60s.
Gretchen:
I feel like I would probably give this a high B. I think it’s bordering on A for me. I think this was a really good story.
JM:
Yeah, I think Pohl is a little self-conscious about some of his short stories. And I think, like, sometimes he seems to be maybe a little heavy-handed with referring to how things are now. Like, he’s very, very in your face about it. Maybe some of that is his background in advertising and stuff like that. But he’s able to bring it across really well.
And yeah, I don’t know. To me, I would actually say this is an A story. It’s not, like, unnoticeable enough to be a C story, and I didn’t, like, disagree with any aspect of it necessarily, so it’s not a B story. So I think actually this fits in, for me, in the A category. It’s just the right length, and yeah, the balance of humor is pretty solid.
So it may not be a total standout, but yeah, it’s, to me, the first hit. Let’s have some more, right? And we’re getting into this now.
Philip José Farmer - "Riders of the Purple Wage"
JM:
Hey, Nate, are you ready to talk about "Winnegans Fake"?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. So this is one of the stories that we’re going to do a little bit more in-depth dive on and let us go into the biography and the summary a little bit more than the others.
So Philip José Farmer is the author of this one, which Ellison refers to as the best, or finest, in the collection. And I guess we’ll see if we agree with that particular statement. But Farmer was born in 1918 and died in 2009. And he had quite a lengthy career and is best known for his "World of Tiers" series, which, most importantly, gets name-checked by Hawkwind on "Levitation".
Also his "Riverworld" series, which involves lots of real-world literary figures as characters, as well as numerous novels that are kind of fan-fiction sequels to classic works, in the same way that Verne wrote a sequel to "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket".
JM:
So he was born pretty early on, and he seems like a real fan author, almost. You can almost say that that’s his thing. Like, he respects other people’s work, and he does kind of latch onto it in a way, but it seems like he does it with some respect and care, I think, from what I can tell so far anyway.
Nate:
Yeah, I’ve never read any of his stuff aside from this one, which we’ll get into, how fan-fiction-y this one feels. But he’s written sequels to "Moby-Dick", "Around the World in Eighty Days", the "Oz" series, "Tarzan", "Sherlock Holmes", among others. And he also wrote a novel under the name Kilgore Trout, which, despite getting permission from Vonnegut, Vonnegut was apparently not very pleased with at all.
So Farmer came across the pulps in 1929 with "Science Wonder Stories" and "Air Wonder Stories", and regularly read "Argosy" and "The Shadow", and as a youth had a wide range of literary influences.
However, the author who most concerns us tonight is none other than the Titan of the English language himself, James Joyce. None other. And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about him before we get into the story.
So Farmer read Joyce probably as a teenager. In an introduction to "The Black Tower", which is the first of "The Dungeon" novels—that is a novel series he didn’t write himself, but was the overseer of—I haven’t actually read any of them, but in this introduction he talks about his literary voyage quite extensively. And after remarking on the aforementioned early influences, says, quote:
“Later I dived into the other works of Dickens and the non-Holmesian stories of Doyle, all of Jack London, and then Balzac, Rabelais, Goethe, Mann, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Fielding, and the poets. When I was twenty, I found the biographies of Sir Richard Francis Burton and the books he had written.”
Presumably "The Arabian Nights" was included in there.
"All read long before I began to sell my fiction to magazines."
So I’m saying probably a teenager based on the phrasing of this sentence, but, you know, I don’t have an exact date when he first encountered him. It was most likely in the late 1930s, just due to how his age would fit grammatically into that sentence.
So yeah, this is extremely derivative of Joyce’s style and humor, specifically "Ulysses", although it is "Finnegans Wake" that gets the explicit name-check, as we mentioned earlier.
Joyce is indeed a true master, and possibly the only person who I’ve read that is as skilled at using the English language as Shakespeare is. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s a type of figure that comes around once every 300 years or so.
Joyce also has a reputation for being extremely difficult, often making the tops of those “hardest novels ever” lists, and I’ve seen more than a few people write him off as being pretentious, pointless exercises for grad students, people saying things like, “Life is too short to bother with literature puzzles,” et cetera. And I would argue the exact opposite: that life is too short not to read someone like Joyce.
And I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but a lot of people do the exact same thing that I did when approaching Joyce, in that they read "Dubliners" or "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" first because they’re possibly intimidated by the difficulty, or reputed difficulty, of "Ulysses" or the "Wake". And I think that is the wrong approach, as while they are indeed more accessible, they also feel like a mere warm-up to the brilliance and genius of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake".
And I think to really experience Joyce and what he has to offer the literary world, and why he is constantly regarded as one of, if not the best author to have ever lived, you really have to put in a good-faith effort in reading those two, or at least "Ulysses", which is a lot more manageable than the "Wake".
And again, despite the references made in the story, "Ulysses" is what is emulated throughout the entirety of this one.
And I’ve read "Ulysses" in full twice, and while some parts are certainly very difficult, I think most readers of literary fiction should be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of it, especially as both "Ulysses" and the "Wake" are so well mapped out and commented on. Sometimes all it takes to get your head around a difficult chapter is to read some criticism that says something like, “In this chapter, Joyce is doing this,” and then you’re like, "ah yes, in this chapter Joyce is doing this", and you can enjoy it as it comes.
There’s more dissertations written about Joyce than any other figure in history aside from Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, so his work has definitely been picked apart six ways to Sunday. Even if you are struggling with the most difficult passages of "Finnegans Wake", there’s definitely a lot, a lot, a lot of commentary and resources out there on it, and I think it’s well worth the effort.
I’d say "Ulysses" comes together on its first read very, very well and is pretty smooth sailing on the second read, whereas "Finnegans Wake" is definitely much more difficult, but certainly not impossible. I’ve only read it once, and from what I understand, it really starts to come together more around your fifth or sixth read.
But even on my first read I got a lot out of it. I felt it was laugh-out-loud funny, and revisiting some of the chapters later in a not-full reread of the book, but just listening to some of the audiobook versions of certain chapters that The Most Ever Company did on YouTube, it makes them a lot more clear for sure.
Though it’s definitely a novel I want to reread multiple times, so I’m not sure when the next time I’ll revisit it in full is. It is a very consuming read that definitely engulfs your entire life when you read it. It’s the craziest reading experience I’ve ever had, like, by far, and no other work ever is remotely comparable to the titan of "Finnegans Wake".
I’ve been busy with other literary ventures, mostly behind-the-scenes Chrononauts work that we talked about last time, but we’ll also talk about more in a few months’ time, but also some other stuff too. But I definitely want to reread that for the remainder of my life.
So yeah, I’ll end this babbling about Joyce and say that the difficulty level of "Ulysses" is about on par with "Riders of the Purple Wage", and since "Dangerous Visions" is, again, I think still the best-selling science fiction anthology of all time—which again may not be a useful statistic in 2026—but I would imagine more people have read this than some of the other obscurities we’ve fished out of the magazines, and possibly even a percentage of those people who enjoyed it enjoyed the experience of reading this one.
So if you enjoyed this, I would strongly urge you to give "Ulysses" a go, especially the audio production done by RTÉ Radio in the 1980s, which is absolutely, absolutely astonishing. And "Ulysses" is just a fantastic work that really has no equal, even those that deliberately try to emulate it.
Which again brings us to this work, and deliberately try to emulate it, it certainly does. And it makes it a little bit hard for me to fully embrace this, in the same way that it’s hard for me to get into those, like, stoner-doom bands that just play Black Sabbath riffs the entire time. The style, the tone, and the humor is totally, 100 percent Joyce.
Before we get into the actual summary, which will be briefer than normal, I’ll just quickly outline that, like "Ulysses", "Riders of the Purple Wage" is about the mundane, though not altogether uneventful or boring, day-to-day activities of regular people, here following the life of an artist going about their business. The difference is that here it’s set in a future Los Angeles where UBI is a reality and widely used.
So yeah, I’ll pause this here and open up to you guys and ask: what did you guys think of this one, the one that Ellison deemed the finest story in the collection?
JM:
So I haven’t really read a lot of Joyce. I’m really interested in starting with "Ulysses" at some point soon, and I’ve been saying that, I think, repeatedly on the podcast probably for a few years now, so I should probably just do it, right? I’ve seen excerpts here and there, and I know a little bit about how the chapters show different styles and are pastiches of different things in a way, and I feel like especially I could be ready for that.
So this—I didn’t really struggle that much after the beginning. This story we’re doing now, it stopped a lot of "Dangerous Visions" readers dead in their tracks.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of the reviews on Goodreads still say that they had a lot of trouble with this one. They couldn’t finish it. They skipped it altogether.
JM:
I guess I have complicated feelings about this. So in general, it seems like people—I have no idea how much some of these people have read James Joyce themselves or whatever, or how much that actually influences how you feel about this—but I feel like people react negatively to Farmer’s “cleverness,” in quotes, all the puns. I guess that’s the part that imitates Joyce, right?
Nate:
Oh, totally. Yeah. One hundred percent.
JM:
Yeah, and people react negatively to that. They might not react negatively to Joyce in the same way. They react negatively because they feel like he’s, okay, trying too hard. I even heard one podcaster kind of opined that he didn’t think that Philip José Farmer had read a lot of the things that he was talking about in the story, and I’m not sure. I’m going to take the position that I think that’s kind of unfair.
Nate:
Yeah, especially because this was 30 years after he most likely encountered Joyce, so I think he had enough time to read basic classics of world literature.
JM:
Yeah, but I guess, you know how we now are in this culture where, like, people just talk about things that they haven’t read, that they just read about on the internet or something like that, and, like, we’re supposed to be suspicious of everything. And if somebody is being oh-so-clever when they write a story: “Oh, why did you mention "Moby-Dick" there? Like, have you even read "Moby-Dick"? Why did you put that in there?”
It feels like there’s this kind of scrutiny over something that’s—all right, so, I mean, Philip José Farmer had already been alive for a while. He was older than I was when he wrote this.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
And I mean, it kind of feels like maybe a kid just having fun, I guess, capturing his influences and stuff like that in a way, and maybe that bothers people. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, and that’s a lot of what Joyce did too, is, you know, "Ulysses" is a gleeful romp through the entire history of English literature. Especially one chapter, "Oxen of the Sun", which is, you know, a chronological parody of literature in general. It’s just kind of fascinating how it comes together.
But yeah, the personality issue, again, it feels more derivative of Joyce’s personality in "Ulysses". So again, to make another musical comparison, I think Frank Zappa is kind of the musical equivalent of Joyce, where he’s an immensely talented composer that often writes these ludicrously complex pieces to confound the listener, but at its core a lot of the music is just a bunch of dick and fart jokes.
JM:
Oh sure. And Frank Zappa loved doo-wop music, right? And he’d, like, make doo-wop albums, right? Which is, like, yeah, simplest music, but just, like, it’s Frank Zappa, so there’s a twist to it, right? That’s just, like, yeah, his personality.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, I know tons of people who are normally into weird prog and challenging music that can’t stand Zappa due to the humor and the personality that comes through. But I mean, if you really like Joyce’s personality, you get a lot out of reading "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake".
And this here feels like a—I don’t want to say stale imitation of Joyce’s personality, but it definitely feels like an imitation of Joyce’s personality.
JM:
But I guess what I’m saying is—and I guess I’m asking you too, Nate, because I’m not as familiar with Joyce—but it feels like a sincere imitation rather than, like, a hypocritical, “Well, I don’t really know. I don’t really know. Like, I haven’t read much of this.”
Nate:
He’s obviously read both "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" multiple times. Like, that’s 100 percent clear. You cannot get this close to Joyce without being intimately familiar with him at all.
I mean, yeah. Yeah, there’s no question that he read the stuff that he talks about here, and I think, quite frankly, to suggest otherwise is completely ludicrous.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. But I kind of picture some of the Joycean situations being pretty ludicrous as well, and that he might have appreciated this story, even though he might have said, “Well, it’s a little too much like my style,” you know? “Well done, son,” you know, like maybe he saw Joyce as Grandpa Winnegan, you know what I mean?
Nate:
Right, yeah, yeah. The plot is actually one of the least Joycean things in the story. But yeah, it would have been interesting to see what Joyce would have had to say in regards to science fiction or weird fiction or genre fiction at all. Doesn’t seem like he had any interest in it.
I mean, despite the fact that "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" were written in the ’20s and the ’30s, when this stuff really starts to get going, and the fact that both books reference, like, a shitload of literary works, there’s, like, almost no references whatsoever to the genre in either work.
The pre-magazine era of scientific romance, 19th-century dime novel and penny-dreadful nonsense was well underway, and there’s a couple references to Gothic fiction, especially one very, very memorable part in "Ulysses".
JM:
But maybe he’s one of those writers who, like, hid some of his interests and was, like, guarding the fact that he had editions of "Amazing Stories" that he was hiding under his coat, like Leslie F. Stone at that point.
Nate:
Yeah, I would love to know for sure, because I tried to look for, like, any interview or writing he did about any of that stuff, and it just—I totally came up short. So I would just, like, literally love to know what James Joyce thought about Hugo Gernsback or his publishing empire, and what he could have potentially thought of somebody who likes his work so much that he basically writes a sequel in spirit 40 years later.
I think he would have been quite flattered. But, you know, who knows for sure? He was quite an odd individual, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would also just like to say that, similar to JM, I have not read "Ulysses" or "Finnegans Wake" myself. I have only read "Dubliners" so far.
JM:
I’ve read a few of the stories from that myself.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I’ve read "Dubliners", and I had actually planned on reading "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" before "Ulysses", so maybe I should take into account that, Nate, you said that’s not the way to go. Maybe I’ll give "Ulysses" a shot instead.
Nate:
Yeah, I think jump right into "Ulysses". I mean, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" follows one of the main characters in "Ulysses", but it almost feels like just extra character shading to Stephen in "Ulysses". I mean, it’s interesting background for sure, and it’s really good. But yeah, "Ulysses" is really where he truly, truly shines, I think.
But yeah, it’s definitely worth reading. It’s, again, not very long, so it’d be actually interesting to read that as an extended prologue to "Ulysses".
JM:
Yeah. All the things, including this story, are pointing us towards reading "Ulysses", so I think we’ve just got to do it, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Reading this story, I had no issue with the style at all. In fact, I think that is one of the strongest parts of this story. I do like the style. It is more about the content behind what—we’ll get into it more—but I think that some of what Farmer is saying in this work is where I kind of have a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, rather than how he’s saying it.
Nate:
Right. Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, that’s fair. I had thought a lot about this one too. And at first I thought I was going to not really enjoy it, but I ended up getting into it for a bit. So I don’t know. To me, this sort of worked surprisingly.
You know, sometimes, like, you just feel like you can’t be too influenced by what the critics say, you know? Some of the people now reading it who might be like, “Oh, it’s too clever for its own good,” and, like, “It’s insufferable,” you know? Like, “I don’t know, I couldn’t get it.”
It is also the longest story in the anthology. But I feel like once I got into it, it went pretty smooth, and I was really enjoying it.
I do think, like, more than just a tribute to Joyce—and I like—I think the science fiction world-building of the story was really good. It’s exactly the kind of world-building that I like to see, in that it’s delivered throughout the story as it goes. And, like, even at the end of the story I was still learning things about where they were and how it worked, right? And I was like, okay, yeah, like, that’s how I like it.
I don’t like the fantasy novels where you feel like you read, like, six prologues explaining how the world was made and the gods and this and that and the other thing. Like, I don’t like that. I want to see, like, the way Fritz Leiber does it, where he just throws you in and he’s, like, kind of expecting you to keep up.
Like, this was a near-future science fiction scenario. Well, I don’t know. I guess it’s a couple hundred years. If you can call that near future compared to some of the—
Nate:
Yeah, I don’t know. It could possibly be near future. I didn’t note down an exact date. Maybe I should have.
JM:
It’s pretty clear. It’s like 200 years in the future from when the story was written.
Yeah. Farmer gives the year as 2166 A.D.
Nate:
But I guess maybe with calling it the near future, there’s, like, no super, super crazy tech. Like, we’re not getting interdimensional travel or this, like, really big space-opera-type stuff, or other wild stuff that you see in science fiction concepts sometimes.
JM:
No, but Philip José Farmer even said, like, he kind of envisioned in that time period you’re able to manufacture matter on a basic scale. So there’s some cool future tech in here, and the way it’s done to support the society, and the way it’s very influenced by the ’60s.
So Nate, did you look into or do you know about "The Triple Revolution" document?
Nate:
No, I did not look into that.
JM:
Okay. I’ll try to explain that, right? That’s a real thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And that was—yeah. So Gretchen, you know.
Gretchen:
If we had done this recording, like, a month ago, I think I would have come down a lot harder on this story than I will be doing now. Mostly I think it’s because it has stuck in my mind quite a lot. And I think that I can’t really say that I dislike a story if I think about it as much as I think about the story.
And part of that is I looked into it a lot and also looked into "The Triple Revolution" concept.
JM:
So yeah, so this actually makes me wonder about Farmer’s politics. I don’t know. It’s not really made clear from the story. I’m not saying, you know, he’s some kind of virulent conservative or something like that. Like, I don’t really know.
But I think, as again we’re seeing, a lot of thought experiments—which is a worthy original conception of science fiction, or speculative fiction, if you would like to use that term, which Harlan Ellison uses a lot, actually—where it’s like, you take something, you bring it to its extreme, and you ask people to think about it, and you’re not necessarily fully endorsing it.
Like, there’s something to be said for that. And there’s a few stories like that in this anthology. And I’ll be talking about one a little later on that’s pretty controversial and, I guess, even now, very uncomfortable.
So I don’t know a ton about it, but "The Triple Revolution" document was something submitted by an Ad Hoc Committee to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. And it’s essentially laying down the three areas of social change that are occurring and that are going to have a huge influence on the world at large.
And the biggest one, now we can probably say, is cybernation, which is basically automation, right? And how it’s changing the way people work and the way people live. And within a short amount of time, a lot of people will be out of work, and a lot of people who are in work will need a greater degree of skills in order to work, because they’ll be working directly with the cybernation, the new technologies and stuff like that. And they won’t need anybody but, like, engineers and stuff like that. Other people won’t be needed.
The second thing is nuclear armament and the nuclear arms race. And the third thing is human rights. So all these things are going to come together and massively change, I guess in particular, American society in the coming years.
And some people took this document very seriously. Now, I don’t know, I think maybe we can ask at some point, like maybe now, maybe at the end: okay, "The Triple Revolution" document probably didn’t make a lot of difference. Like, nothing really happened with it. But it seemed like people were noticing it. Martin Luther King Jr. had mentioned it just before his assassination, which happened after this anthology came out.
It was kind of a big deal at the time, I guess.
And I guess Farmer must have seen this and was, like, thinking ahead to what the changes recommended by this involved: things like massive public housing, increased public transit, union representation for the unemployed. So basically even the unemployed have their own union. Things like what we’re seeing now with the 15-minute cities and stuff like that, which basically is the clutch, as they describe what happens to the different levels of Los Angeles and stuff like that in this story.
And all these things are kind of laid out in the document. And these are recommendations for how we can actually make things easier for the country, which are so opposed to what we now think of as American policy, and what people probably did even then at that time. I mean, the Vietnam War was literally just around the corner, right?
Yeah. So there’s this really interesting historical precedent to this story. Farmer was obviously thinking about these kinds of things as well as the James Joyce tribute, and why he decided to put all these things together in this story, I’m not really sure. But you know what? It worked pretty well. I’m kind of happy about it, honestly.
Nate:
Yeah, the future L.A. as a character, as a huge megastructure-type city, and the descriptions of the future society are probably my favorite parts of this. And I think I’ve made the complaint before that a lot of science fiction stories, especially in the earlier pulp era, are focusing on these, like, world-changing or world-saving heroes who the entire fate of the universe rests on. And it’s a lot less common that we get a lived-in world where we just see the lives of regular people.
And that’s one aspect that I really, really like with this story. Again, in some ways mirroring Joyce, but in other ways really leaning into a plausible science fiction future here and getting to explore that with the same kind of idea of just following a regular person around and seeing what his day-to-day life is. It’s a really cool approach that I wish people would use more.
JM:
Yeah. And in this case, he’s an artist, right?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, he is.
JM:
Yeah. And I guess it’s something that I’ve heard people talk about, was like, well, if we didn’t have to slave to the grind all the time, we could be great artists and we could just do what we wanted to do, and society would thank us because we would be awesome at making great art, right?
And, I mean, it sounds good. But what is it? Grandpa Winnegan says, like, maybe ten percent of the population, if that, is even capable of doing something like that. The rest would just run around and get into bar fights, right?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So yeah, there’s definitely a lot of pithy little lines here like that.
So yeah, like with "Ulysses", we get a bunch of little vignettes, all in different prose styles. Though here, the vignettes are shorter than the ones in "Ulysses". The first one is probably the closest we get to the actual "Wake" itself, with Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan—which is a fantastic name—having sex with his girlfriend, kind of morphing into him making art, and the two are superimposed and flow into one another quite fluidly.
Though it’s definitely possible to follow this scene, and, well, good luck following anything in the "Wake" during your first read-through, even with the explanatory text.
So Chib, as he’s called, is in fact a modern artist whose work is highly sexual and taboo. But he primarily lives off the purple wage, or welfare, the UBI of the future. L.A. of the future is this huge megastructure-type city. And yeah, it’s just really cool to see lived-in worlds where we don’t follow the life-changing events. We just see the people living in them. And yeah, I really like that element of the story.
JM:
Yeah. So for some reason, we start with him having a disappointing sexy dream. And it’s, like, done in such a way that it’s very, very fever-dream-ish. And I think, like, with the lack of patience that some readers have, that whole opening sequence—it gets a lot easier to follow it after that. So if you just plow your way through that, you’re golden, right? It’s really not that bad. Just enjoy the puns, the penisnake and the cuntcealment and you’ll be fine.
Nate:
Yeah. So Chib lives at home with his mother. And hidden away is his great-great-grandfather, who, as far as the government is concerned, has been dead for 25 years, but is very much alive and enjoying the necessary crime of tax evasion.
Much like "Les Misérables", Grandpa Winnegan is being pursued by Falco Accipiter of the Internal Revenue Bureau.
JM:
Yeah, I didn’t think about that. It’s totally "Les Misérables".
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But yeah, it’s just, like, a great subplot and culminates with him finding the coffin where he’s supposedly buried, and it is shot up into the atmosphere, burning up all the billions of dollars in cash, with the text “WINNEGANS FAKE!” unfolding. And despite the references, very non-Joycean. It’s just an absolutely great, great scene.
But most of the story, though, is Chib bumming around future L.A. with his artist friends, presumably mirroring Farmer’s IRL crew of whatever weird and eccentric artist friends he had around him.
Chib gets his girlfriend, Benedictine, pregnant, basically lies to her about birth control and beats her up. Pretty nasty moment that, like a lot of other stories in the anthology, does show a mean streak towards women.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I’ve got to say, I think that this is really the moment that kind of tarnished the story. I feel like it’s just such a really terrible scene, very violating towards her.
Nate:
It is.
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I also—I think the humor throughout this, I think in general, is, like, pretty fun. I do like the puns. I do like the farce-esque vibe. But I really think that treating this moment as it does, so ridiculously and with so much comedy, just, I think, really rubbed me the wrong way.
Nate:
Yeah. And there is one moment in "Ulysses", too, where I wouldn’t say something outwardly violent, like physically violent, happens, but it’s definitely, like, creepy and disgusting, and is the moment that got the novel banned for obscenity during its original serial publication. And it’s a little bit more unsettling than pretty much anything in the "Dangerous Visions" anthology, just because you’ve been spending a lot of time with this one character and this event happens, and you’re like, well, that’s pretty gross.
JM:
I totally understand, like, not finding this funny. I don’t know. Like, to me, I couldn’t take it very seriously. Like, it’s very, very slapstick and just—I mean, I understand, like, I guess maybe again, if she were more of, like, a character or something like that, then maybe I would feel worse about it. But I just—it’s just ridiculous and silly. I don’t know. I didn’t really mind it that much because it just seemed so, like, ridiculously over the top and, like, stupid. I don’t know.
Nate:
Yeah, I’m sure that was the intent, but it doesn’t come off that way.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m not really excusing it.
Gretchen:
I also feel just like we’ve already discussed one, we’re going to discuss a few other stories in this anthology that do have some violence towards women that are also much more gruesome than what happens here. Perhaps this is not as bad as what we’re going to see in, like, a few stories from now, but I think that at least in those stories it’s treated with at least a little bit more gravity, or at least you realize that this is, like, a very horrible thing that’s happening.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Even if that’s where the shock value, like, hinges upon, it still feels wrong.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely felt like it pushes the limits of good taste, for sure. And I’m not sure if that’s present in his other works or if that’s just Ellison rubbing off on him, as it does seem to be a common theme with some of these stories here, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I will say that I did read a few other Philip José Farmer stories.
JM:
Oh yeah?
Gretchen:
I quite enjoyed the ones that I read. There is one called "Mother" that could have fit into this anthology, I feel like. It has some really strange psychosexual elements and stuff that I think is in this work, but I think done in a much more serious and grounded way.
Nate:
Right, right. Yeah, I’d be interested to check out some of his other stuff. I mean, just the fact that he’s paying tribute to a lot of the pulp greats through references here, which is something that, again, Joyce does a lot with other literary figures, but never the pulp stuff. So it’s kind of cool to see Farmer picking up the slack on that and making all these puns and references too.
JM:
Yeah, I think Farmer does a really good job of kind of holding your hand a little bit and walking through some of the stuff, which I think, again, I just feel differently than some of our contemporaries, I think, who talked about this story.
I feel like it’s pretty accessible and gets more so as you get through it and get familiar with what he’s doing. And he is kind of holding your hand a little bit and explaining things. Like, he even explains all the silly things that he’s saying, like the puns and the weird names of the characters. In the end, he kind of just explains everything. And he’s just like, this is why it’s like this.
And yeah, he’s not, like, just throwing names at you to try to impress you with making you think that he’s read all these books, which apparently some people even doubt that he’s read all these books, right?
Yeah, I don’t know. I want to be more fair to Farmer and how much he’s trying here, personally, even though, yeah, I can see why people don’t get on with this.
Yeah, I can understand that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I also do want to say that, thinking of, Nate, your comment that here is Farmer introducing the pulp sci-fi to a Joycean style, I’ve got to mention that the one female character that nothing really too bad happens to, and also isn’t, like, too abused by the narrative, is a sci-fi writer that is named Huga Wells-Erb Heinsturbury, which is such a fun name. I really did enjoy that.
Nate:
Yeah. And there’s tons of stuff like that in here. And I think that you really can’t summarize a story like this. You just need to experience it for yourself.
And yeah, I think overall I’m positively disposed to it. But, you know, again, it does feel very, very derivative at its core.
So I’ll conclude with the summary by saying that if you like this and were able to make decent sense out of it during your first read and get a deeper understanding of it on your second, and especially if you like the humor, then you really need to read "Ulysses". I think if you’re more or less okay with reading this, then you should be good to go for most of "Ulysses". There’s certainly some major difficulty spikes at parts, but most of it should be smooth sailing.
And yeah, I would give this a B overall. Again, it’s hard for me to bump it up to an A level just because it does feel so derivative of another author’s work, and that really does shine through. But I think overall I enjoyed this, even if it is flawed in that and some other ways.
JM:
All right, I think this is part of the interesting thing about doing this. Like, I don’t think we all have to agree on even what the tier categories exactly mean, because I know I just kind of sprang this on you guys, and it’s fine.
And I’m actually going to give this an A because I think this was not only trying, but it tried in a way that I don’t think I’m going to forget in a hurry. And I’m sure Phil would be happy if I’m even more inclined to read James Joyce after reading this.
But the science fiction world-building is really good, and I feel like the way everything came together in the end, even though the story is not really about a plot—it’s, yeah, this guy going about his thing and basically the mystery of his grandfather-slash-great-grandfather. And he’s, like, the last of the billionaires and stuff, which I guess kind of makes the young Winnegan a bit of a nepo baby, but, you know—
Yeah, I mean, it’s fine. I got on with it. Just reading about all these other things—I just watched this, like, four-hour—it took me, it took me, like, weeks to get through it—but there’s talk about "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand that brought in, like, all these different things and contemporary stuff and everything like that, obviously some politics that I really don’t agree with. Getting on with that and then getting on with this, to me, like, yeah, I definitely choose something like this.
I don’t know exactly what Farmer thinks, but I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong about most of the population probably just wasting their time in ridiculous stuff, given the choice, right? I don’t know. Maybe he’s not wrong. I don’t necessarily know that he disapproves of everything in "The Triple Revolution" document.
So yeah, it’s just an interesting experiment. Again, I can totally see people getting cross because it’s so long compared to everything else. Like, there are so many short stories.
Nate:
It is significantly longer than the rest of the stories in here.
JM:
There are so many really short stories in here.
Gretchen:
I do enjoy the style and I respect the effort that Farmer put into this. Mostly it’s just more from the mean-spiritedness that is contained in the other stories in this collection. But I think the clashing of that with the humor here, I think, just doesn’t work for me overall. And especially, as we mentioned, that particular scene left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
So I think I would give this a C, but with the caveat that if you would ask me about the story right after I read it, I probably would have given it a D. And I think that that is also because, as you said, it’s a longer work and it is very early in the anthology. So you haven’t really been able to dip your toes in as much. So I think that hitting this story so soon and not really having the chance to get into some of the other stories in this anthology, I think, does work against it in some ways. But I do appreciate it a lot more now than I did when I first read it.
JM:
One thing I really appreciate too is the relaxed, free form of the story, which kind of makes me ask: how high do you think Philip José Farmer was when he wrote some of this?
I don’t know. But yeah.
Nate:
I’d imagine he indulged. Counterculture artists and all.
JM:
Yeah. So you have these, like, kind of little chapter titles, right? And sometimes the chapter titles are, like, part of sentences that are to come, right? It’s starting a sentence that’s completed in the next line, right? And you’re like, oh, okay, cool.
And then when he feels the need to switch to an interview format, he just does it. Just like, oh, okay, we’re going to do that now. Cool.
Like, I honestly wanted more stuff like that in the anthology. I think that overall I’m really pleased with the amount of variety and tones of voice and stuff in the anthology. But this is the one story that really didn’t just push the envelope out in, like, oh, let’s break some taboos and let’s shock some people.
Like, there was certainly a bit of that. There’s a bit of incest. There’s a bit of weird—all kinds of weird sex stuff. There’s, like, uncomfortable talk about immigration and other things and different things that are going on in the future.
And, like, this is the only one that really pushed the limits of, I guess, what people were used to seeing in, like, science fiction genre literature. You’re looking at something like what was in Amazing Stories, probably most of the magazines in the ’50s and stuff like that. Like, they weren’t doing stuff like this, right?
Nate:
No, I mean, it’s definitely the only one that feels—I, again, I hate to harp on this, and it’s hard for me to call it truly experimental when it’s derivative—but it’s really the only one that feels experimental in form in the entire anthology, where the rest more or less read as straight-through stories. Even the PKD story, which does get kind of out there, it doesn’t really play a lot with form and the English language and style and structure and all that like this one does.
JM:
Yeah. So, dangerous vision? Yeah, I still think it’s a dangerous vision. I think politically there’s some uncomfortable stuff here. And I think the argument over whether something is dated or not is a lot more complex than what a lot of people think.
Like, I think, as we can say, oh yeah, we feel like this is a story written in the ’60s, but then here we are in 2026 and we’re going, yeah, okay, so how do we feel about this story now, right?
Like, things didn’t go the way Philip José Farmer thought perhaps they might, at least in this story. We don’t know if he really thought that they might go like this. I don’t think he’s standing on a soapbox screaming at people, telling them to, like, ignore "The Triple Revolution" document. Like, I don’t think he is, right? Because I think if he was doing that, he wouldn’t have had as much fun as he clearly had writing this, right?
A good effort, I think. And although, yeah, again, I understand maybe not everyone liking that it takes up so much space in this book because they don’t want to read something like this. I get it. But I give it the first tier. I give it the A tier because I think it’s really trying to do something different, and I’m not going to be forgetting it in a hurry.
Maybe my lack of knowledge of "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake", but especially "Ulysses", maybe that’s holding me back a little bit. But yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I would like this less. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s hard to say, right?
I again feel like it’s only the beginning of the story that’s really a struggle to get through, because you don’t know what the hell’s going on, describing Winnegan having this weird, unsatisfying sex dream, right? That is just like—yeah, I don’t know, why is that there, right?
But why shouldn’t it be there, right? Why not? It’s "Dangerous Visions". It’s in the future. It’s weird sex. It’s a weird sex thing. Like, yeah, bring it on. I don’t know.
Gretchen:
At the beginning of this story, during that scene, I was like, oh, this is fun. I was really having a fun time with it.
JM:
So I guess this is maybe a good time to bring up: now, this is the 1960s. We’re already having issues with violence against women and stuff like that in the anthology. And this is the first story that mentions homosexuality.
And yeah, I mean, the depictions of homosexuality in this anthology are definitely a little—I don’t know. I think most people nowadays would find it questionable. It’s not in here a lot, but it’s just, like, it’s very off, I guess.
But even in the Samuel Delany story, which is kind of funny, like—yeah, I don’t know. I think we feel a lot differently about this stuff now. And even that, maybe that is interesting. Like, maybe that adds to the dangerous-vision aspect, right? Maybe the way we see things differently now actually contributes to how much of a dangerous vision some of these stories might actually be, right?
Because the concept of a dangerous vision is complicated. I think we’ll see as we go on through this because, yeah, I have some interesting theories about how some of these might or might not be dangerous visions.
Nate:
Yeah, I don’t know. That subject in particular is not really handled well throughout the anthology, based on Harlan Ellison’s own comments and a couple of the other stories in particular that are really not good at all. So I’m personally glad that things have changed in society where this stuff would be far less acceptable in the modern publishing world than it was in the 1960s. And it really always is a minefield at best.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, to Mrs. Whatever-Her-Name-Is from Philadelphia, maybe even the fact that homosexuality comes up at all in these stories is enough of a dangerous vision. I don’t know.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, I guess. But I don’t know. It’s definitely not handled well, I don’t think. And yeah, depictions of LGBTQ themes in stories from this time are always, like, a minefield at best. So you just kind of have to keep that in mind when reading some of this stuff, is that it’s not the greatest.
JM:
And it’ll come up in a few of the stories.
Nate:
Definitely, yeah.
JM:
We’ll probably point them out as they appear. But yeah. And again, like some of Ellison’s own—
Gretchen:
Yeah. A message to Harlan: I don’t think that just knowing Samuel R. Delany means you can kind of say slurs.
Nate:
And I don’t even think he was out at that point in time.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So that’s this idea of the predatory homosexual, right?
Nate:
Yeah. The trans-panic thing comes up later too, and really one of my, like, least favorite tropes ever.
Yeah, it’s a bummer.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, Delany, I do feel like when it comes to the trans issues, it’s not—not the best.
Nate:
No.
No, definitely not.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And there’s some complicated stuff involving Poul Anderson that I’m sure we’ll talk about eventually.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Cool. All right, are we ready to move on to the next one?
Miriam Allen deFord - "The Malley System"
All right. So now it’s time to talk about "The Malley System" by Miriam Allen deFord.
So Miriam deFord is a new writer to me.
Gretchen:
Yes. Although something very important to point out, because Ellison loves to do it: she’s very old. This is very important.
Nate:
Yeah. This introduction that he writes is definitely one of the first that he really starts, like, needling the author and kind of picking fights with them. So I’m sure she rolled her eyes at this entire thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So Miriam is very obviously our eldest contributor to "Dangerous Visions". She was born in Philadelphia in 1888, and she was heavily involved with the suffrage movement. And she said she was a born feminist.
Her early writings include some of her journalistic work, and a book entitled "They Were San Franciscans", published in 1941. And she sounds like a really interesting person, a really interesting writer. She was very, very politically active. She was, like many others, a socialist around the late 1910s.
And from what I can tell, she’s mostly known as a writer of nonfiction works, including some translations, and also writing about what we would now call, I guess, true crime. Maybe she’s not really up there with Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood" and all that, but, like, she seems to be also interested in the really historical aspect of that.
One of her famous books is "The Overbury Affair", where she discusses the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, an early-17th-century English gentleman, I believe. And she, like, treats the case as though it’s a modern case. And she dissects all the different things that went into it and several hundred years’ worth of primary-source documents and stuff like that. This seems really interesting.
But she also wrote some contemporary mysteries and thrillers, edited some anthologies of her own, and she was interested in science fiction. One of her anthologies is entitled "Space, Time and Crime". She really seems to be interested in this. She has a couple of collections of her own.
Now, most of her science fiction seems like it was written between the late ’40s and the late ’50s, and a lot of it is featured in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction". And she, like many others, seems to have been a friend of Anthony Boucher.
Anthony Boucher was kind of this interesting cross-genre figure in that he became the editor of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", and we’ve seen a couple of things that that magazine published that we’ve talked about before on Chrononauts.
Now, he was well known in the mystery circles, and not just in terms of magazines and stuff. But, like, for example, "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" radio series from the ’40s, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce—a lot of those episodes were written by him, often with Denis Green, including original stories and adaptations of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
And I would like to get to something by Anthony Boucher later on Chrononauts. In fact, I have something lined up for a future Host’s Choice, which is his murder-mystery novel written about the 1940s American sci-fi fan community, "Rocket to the Morgue". And I’d just love to do that for a Host’s Choice. I just think it sounds like so much fun, and I would love to do that.
But an interesting thing about Boucher is that because of his, I guess, cross-genre thing, he was able to actually bring a lot of mystery writers into the fold of science fiction and cross them over. And Miriam Allen deFord was one of those people.
So she actually has a couple of her own collections of science fiction stories. But in general, it seems like she’s more known as a crime and mystery writer. And she’s been anthologized quite a lot, including by New English Library and a lot of other prestigious things.
So she was about 79 years old when she wrote this story, "The Malley System". And, well, right away we have some extreme unpleasantness that she’s just throwing right at you. And Ellison just seems so pleased that he’s gotten this little old lady to write this, like, really extreme stuff. It is hilarious, right?
Nate:
Yeah, it does get really excessively violent during the beginning. And especially what we get is these little scenes of extreme, over-the-top violence, and then, I guess, a basic little thought experiment at the end that philosophizes on criminal justice. And, you know, what if—
It seems a little bit juvenile to me. But I don’t know. I didn’t mind it overall. It feels very disjointed and doesn’t really come together like a whole story would.
JM:
Yeah. So I think this is another case where you’re getting someone who’s really consciously writing for the anthology. And it’s several different perspectives, right? The story is written in a way where it’s, like, several different perspectives of people committing horrible crimes. And it’s their perspective.
And then in the end, you get a conversation between a warden and this visiting criminologist from the African Union who’s, like, coming in to kind of examine the correctional facilities and how things are going with this Malley System.
I guess what it reminds me most of is "A Clockwork Orange", right? But there’s this weird thing too where you kind of feel like—I don’t mean to contradict Ellison. I don’t mean to, like, say that she’s being silly. But I think, like, yeah, she’s kind of being like, oh, it’s a science fiction thing, so I have to include this laser gun and all this stuff. Like, “I shot him with my laser gun.” It just seems a little—I don’t know. Like, the tone is a little weird. I don’t know.
So there’s a couple of stories here where I’m like, yeah, I want to know more about that author, right? I want to know what else they wrote. So I think that’s my main takeaway from this.
So for me, this is a perfect example of a B story because I feel like I respect it a lot, and I kind of, like, think she’s trying to do something cool, but I’m not sure it’s quite coming off.
I guess I don’t mind the extreme unpleasantness, in a way, but it feels—I don’t know—not gratuitous, because obviously the whole point is that these criminals are reliving the moments of their crime every day when they go to sleep, right? Practically. And it’s supposed to turn them away from it. And eventually it does. And eventually it goes so far that they’re not even sane anymore, right?
The idea of the Malley System is extreme correction and punishment.
Yeah. It works, but maybe—maybe it works too well. I don’t know. There’s a couple stories about correctional shit in here. I do think they’re interesting. So I don’t know. I liked it.
But I think my main takeaway was, well, I wouldn’t mind reading more Miriam Allen deFord. Like, I’d like to see what she’s about. I’d like to see more about her. But I don’t know.
Nate:
Yeah I haven’t read anything else either, though I did see she translated the poems of Catullus in the 1920s, which are extremely, extremely dirty. So I’d be kind of curious to check out some of her other stuff, maybe some of her earlier science fiction stuff, because she was almost 80 years old when she wrote this.
But yeah, I don’t know. I’d give this a B. It does feel kind of just thrown together and doesn’t, like, 100 percent work for me as a story as a whole. And I think the beginning does feel a little bit excessive in some ways.
But I don’t know. It’s not bad. It definitely has some interesting elements, even if the overall thought experiment into criminal justice isn’t really, like, that deep or hard-hitting as it possibly could be. But yeah, I don’t know. A B sounds about right for me. Maybe, like, a low B.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree with a B rating. And I think that’s because I do kind of like the idea that she’s getting at. It is kind of in the vein, as you said, JM, of "A Clockwork Orange".
And I had in mind, because I read it a few months ago, "Chain-Gang All-Stars" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, which also kind of explores the idea of punishment—who deserves punishment?
I like this move that she makes, where you have all these horrible stories of people committing terrible crimes, and then the narrative is sort of like, and look at how they’re being punished. And you kind of are asked a little bit to sympathize with them, even though they’re these really terrible people who we get such shocking moments from their lives.
And I think there is something that is interesting in there, but I don’t think it is at all developed in a very substantial way. I think that another story could probably have done something more with that. There’s a potential there, but I don’t think it really manages to execute it very well.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely kind of agree with that. I don’t know. I think this story is, like—I can see it glimmering on my dangerous-vision scale. Like, it’s there. I feel it, but I’m not quite connecting with it as much as I want to.
I don’t know. Again, I’ve read extreme horror stuff and all that, so I’ve seen some really extreme stuff. This doesn’t really—like, I’m not sure. It doesn’t bother me or anything. But at the same time I’m like, I mean, it just starts right in with that. Like, it just—holy crap—just throws one horrible scene after another.
And it’s just like, I guess I’m glad she wrote it, but I’m also like, is this so—like, you really took the purpose of the anthology that literally, and you’re just going to throw that out there, like, right now? I don’t know. I just—yeah.
Gretchen:
Literal dangerous visions.
JM:
I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be honest. Like, we don’t get to know any of these characters, right? It’s just—it’s done, but it’s done very deliberately. It’s like, okay, this is the moment before they got caught, right? Like, this is the moment where they did their thing, the ultimate thing. And this is what they have to experience now eternally.
I mean, not eternally, but, like, almost eternally, right? They have to keep reliving it.
In the beginning, maybe they’re reliving that moment and loving it, but eventually they can’t help it: the empathy creeps in, and from then it turns horrible. And after a certain number of repetitions, it’s unbearable.
And I mean, it’s an interesting theory, right? I kind of dig it.
And the way she expresses it is funny, though. She’s like, yeah, it’s just like people going to a sweet shop. You work there, right? So you can have as many of the sweets as you want. And, like, at first people are like, oh yeah, I get all the cupcakes. Amazing, right?
And then after a while they’re like, yeah, I don’t really like cupcakes anymore. It’s too sweet for me, right? I don’t like eating cupcakes. And then eventually they can’t stand the sight of cupcakes, right? Just like, no, it makes my stomach turn over every time I think of cupcakes, right?
I don’t know. It’s interesting. I can kind of get behind it in a funny way, right? Like, I don’t know how effective it would really be.
And it’s just funny the way she keeps throwing in these very sci-fi things, right? I think maybe the story would have been more effective if she didn’t do that. Just knowing how "A Clockwork Orange" does it, right?
We’re not really sure what year it is or anything like that, but we kind of feel like it’s sometime in the future because the way things are is a little bit different. And yeah, we can do all these things to give people drugs and condition them in this way. Like, maybe they could do that in the ’60s, but probably not, right?
One of these things that’s up in the air. We think there’s these psyop experiments going on and stuff like that, but we don’t really know, right? We think that it might be possible to program a human being, but we’re not really that sure.
Here, it just seems like, yeah, it’s taken that, and that would be enough. We don’t need the laser guns and all that stuff.
I don’t know. But at the same time, maybe that’s just her having fun. Like, why shouldn’t we let Miriam deFord have some fun with it, right?
I don’t know. I liked it, but it’s a B story. It’s a B story.
Robert Bloch - "A Toy for Juliette"
JM:
Okay. Here we go then, when it feels like "Dangerous Visions" takes a detour into something entirely different, and we get the little Jack the Ripper obsession.
“My friends just call me Jack.”
There’s even a story that you can read that’s connected to this in a way that isn’t even part of the anthology, and that’s "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch.
And Robert Bloch is in here with "A Toy for Juliette", but "Yours Truly" is a really famous story about Jack the Ripper.
It’s in "The Dark Descent".
Nate:
Yeah, I was looking into how many times it’s been republished and produced, and it’s a lot. It has adaptations for film and TV. It’s definitely a lot.
JM:
And it’s fun. And I don’t know, I think that if you’re a clever reader, the first time you read this, you probably know where it’s going. But yeah, it’s a fun little story.
I really like Robert Bloch sometimes. Sometimes I don’t like him as much. I kind of feel like every now and then he’ll write a story that doesn’t really hit the mark. But in general, a really cool writer.
And he shares in common something with some of the other writers here. So we haven’t really mentioned this yet, talking about "Dangerous Visions", but there’s a lot of TV writers in here.
And aside from the SF genres and the magazines and stuff like that, I think that’s something that draws together some of what Ellison’s picked to fit in the anthology, because he himself was a TV writer by this point. And I think that a lot of the people that he knew at this time were also TV writers and screenwriters.
So some of them had had experience in the magazines in the ’50s. Maybe that’s where they got their start. But by the 1960s, they were pretty solidly in-demand TV writers.
And Robert Bloch actually got his start way back in the 1930s, and he actually was one of the original, I guess you could say, devotees of H. P. Lovecraft.
But the kind of stories that he’s known for are different from that, and they tend to be psychological. They tend to be, I guess, more or less grounded in the real world, so to speak. And yeah, obviously, "Psycho" is a key example of that. But there’s also a lot of other short stories.
I think at least three of the Amicus portmanteau anthologies are based on Robert Bloch’s work.
He’s also written episodes of "Star Trek", and episodes of—I believe "The Twilight Zone" as well are adapted from his stuff. So we’re going to see that a couple more times as well in here.
But Robert Bloch wrote "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper". And I guess that’s a story about Jack the Ripper in 1940s Chicago.
Nate:
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve read it. I read it in "The Dark Descent" around the time we started the podcast, in like 2020 or so. So it’s definitely not fresh in my mind, but I didn’t reread it for this. So I probably should have.
I mean, Ellison definitely name-checks both of these stories as being sequels to that one. So, I mean, it definitely is very much tied into the continuity here.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I checked out "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" after reading these stories.
JM:
Yeah. And of course, talking about "Star Trek", the "Star Trek" Jack the Ripper episode as well, which he wrote as well. And that’s "Wolf in the Fold", where Scotty gets accused of murdering these women, and it turns out to be this body-hopping Jack the Ripper alien.
And yeah, it’s one of the more horror-themed "Star Trek: The Original Series" episodes, and it’s one I’ve always enjoyed.
So here we have the—I guess—I don’t know, from the way it sounds, Harlan Ellison was, like, goading Bloch into writing a sort of—
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly what happened.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. So basically, we had a really strange situation here where Bloch writes the story, and Ellison gets the story and he’s like, yeah, I’ll publish this in "Dangerous Visions". But he said, well, this isn’t really what I had in mind, so I’m going to write, like, my own sequel to it. And I’m also going to publish it in "Dangerous Visions".
So for this weird side road, it almost feels like all of a sudden we’re in a different anthology. Like, it’s just really weird.
This side trip, I didn’t mind it. I kind of enjoyed it. But I just feel like—I don’t know. I almost feel like both these stories are a distraction. Like, it’s just really weird.
I always forget about them when I think about "Dangerous Visions" now, and then I’m like, oh yeah, those are in there at the end of Volume One, right?
It’s cool. I like them. But yeah, I’m not sure. It’s weird. Like, it just feels like these were put here on a whim of Ellison’s.
Maybe the whole anthology is a whim of Ellison’s, though. I don’t know.
Nate:
Yeah, I didn’t like either of these stories. These are both Ds for me. I don’t really have anything to say too much about either of them. I just—they did not work for me. I wasn’t really a fan.
And my recommendation is just read the Bloch original if you want some Jack the Ripper stuff.
Gretchen:
I’ve got to be honest. I think that my feelings about these stories are also colored by the fact that I’m not really that intrigued by the Jack the Ripper story in general. I do find this sort of odd back-and-forth between Bloch and Ellison to be kind of interesting in itself, and having this weird sort of experiment in this book of one of them writing a story and then the other writing after that story.
I do think I enjoy Ellison’s story a little bit more. I don’t know, though. I’m not the biggest fan of these. I don’t know if I’d give them Ds, but maybe, like, a C.
JM:
Okay.
Nate:
Yeah, I’m not sure which I liked a little bit more, though. The audiobook versions—Mara Wilson read "A Toy for Juliette" and Simon Vance did "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", which I thought were both amusing and good choices. They read the stories well, but I just did not expect to see those two of all people in here. So that was kind of—
JM:
The Robert Bloch story, "A Toy for Juliette", very, very short. I kind of liked it. I mean, it was fine for what it was.
It’s kind of funny because just the way she was talking about, like, as her grandfather has the time machine, and her grandfather is doing all these things traveling through time and bringing her toys and stuff.
So I don’t know if either of you guys have heard of one of the original very outlandish ideas for what "Doctor Who" was supposed to be. But it’s this idea that the Doctor was supposed to be not exactly evil, but he was supposed to be not the protagonist. He was supposed to be essentially from a future society, and he wanted to prevent that society from coming to pass.
So he would go through time and space trying to prevent people from inventing stuff, for example. Like, stop them from creating things, stop science from advancing in a certain way. And his companions would be opposed to that.
It’s kind of funny because this story almost made me think of what the ultimate way that’s going to go. Like, okay, it almost made me think of this super-perverted version of "Doctor Who" or something like that.
And here’s his granddaughter, right, that is just, like, bringing back these things. Oh, here’s something for you to play with, this gentleman from the Victorian era, and everything looks fine. But oh no, it’s Jack the Ripper.
And he kills her. He gets the knife. She was going to kill him. She had the knife and everything, but I guess he was just that good. He found the knife without her even knowing.
And he’s Jack the Ripper. He’s that good. What can you say?
Nate:
Yeah. I guess I’m glad that William Hartnell and Susan didn’t get up to this sort of business when they were hanging out together.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, it was good for what it was. A lot of the Bloch stories do have a twist at the end, so there’s quite a few authors here who are known for their twists at the end.
That can be, I guess, perceived as a dangerous vision. I don’t know.
Nate:
Yeah, these made me roll my eyes more than once.
Gretchen:
I also do feel like the twist is kind of ruined with Ellison’s introduction about, like, this is about Jack the Ripper. We’re talking about Jack the Ripper.
So I feel like maybe if at least the twist would have been more effective outside of the introduction, like, just on its own. But of course Ellison does introduce each of the stories.
Harlan Ellison - "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World"
JM:
So I do think these two stories—I mean, they’re written by two different people—so I do think they’re quite different in their execution, their method and everything like that.
And I’m not sure if my barrier between B and C is kind of weird, and I acknowledge that, but I’m giving "A Toy for Juliette" a C because to me this is, like, fine. There’s not a lot that makes me remember it necessarily.
And with the Ellison story, I’m giving it a B because I just think that it’s, like, so over-the-top and loud. Like, the whole story might be in all caps, right? I don’t know. It’s just like that. I kind of feel it, but I’m not sure I feel it that much.
So Jack the Ripper’s in the future. He killed the girl, and the granddad comes out and he’s like, oh yeah, good, you killed my granddaughter. That’s what I wanted, right? Let me introduce you to some friends of mine.
So he takes Jack the Ripper through this awesome modern city, and it’s cool. It reminds me of the utopian stories. There’s a couple of stories in here that are like that. It reminds me of the 1800s utopian stories where it was like, so let’s see how stuff works here, right?
More or so, it’s just weird. And the granddad doesn’t explain that much. And Jack’s just totally—you know, unfamiliar surroundings, and it’s just overwhelming.
And by the way, I felt a little bit of the Jack the Ripper obsession too. I watched the movie "Time After Time" a couple of weeks ago. And that has Malcolm McDowell playing H. G. Wells and David Warner playing Jack the Ripper, using Wells’s time machine that he obviously built to transport themselves to 1979 San Francisco.
Where Jack the Ripper decides that actually 1979 San Francisco is really awesome, and H. G. Wells is like, well, it’s not really the kind of utopia that I was hoping for. Maybe I can fall in love with this woman and take her back to the 1800s. That would be really awesome, right?
So that’s exactly what happens. And it’s a really fun movie. It’s really humorous in some ways. Like, it’s kind of lighthearted and cute. But also, like, it’s cool that they did a little bit of research into Wells and what he would have thought of this.
Malcolm McDowell is not at all what I picture with H. G. Wells. And the voice is not right at all, because you can actually hear H. G. Wells speak if you want. And yeah, he had a very distinctive high-pitched voice that’s not at all Malcolm McDowell’s.
But I think Malcolm was actually kind of in on the joke a little bit and having fun with it. So I don’t know. Fun movie, completely unrelated. But another Jack the Ripper thing, right?
So Jack’s wandering around this futuristic city killing people, and there’s some extreme descriptions of women being cut up, anatomy moved around in various impossible-seeming ways, right? Which is the hallmark of extreme horror, where anatomical impossibilities are made real.
And we have that here. We have breasts being shoved into mouths and legs being turned into arms. And it’s really extreme and weird, right?
I think it does lose a certain amount of effectiveness when it’s done like this. So it was fine.
Again, for me, it’s a B story because I respect what it was trying to do. I kind of felt it, especially in the end. He’s like, “My name’s not Jack!” And he’s, like, screaming into nothingness, and, like, it feels so loud. “I’m so angry!” And I don’t know. I get it. I get it.
Gretchen:
I think I enjoyed the Ellison more because I do always enjoy the trope of taking people who are considered serial killers or something, where they kind of have this larger-than-life persona. They always seem like they’re mythical in some way, and then, like, cutting them down to size.
I do enjoy that trope.
JM:
And it actually reminded me of the future travelers in "Vintage Season" by C. L. Moore. Like, the people in the future and how they’re, like, dealing with these, “toys,” from the past kind of thing.
Nate:
Yeah.
Yeah, I don’t like this. Most of this I was just like, yeah, okay, Harlan, whatever.
JM:
Nate, you really didn’t like these.
Nate:
No, not really.
Brian W. Aldiss - "The Night That All Time Broke Out"
JM:
All right. Well, finally, we have the last story of Volume One of the vivisected edition. And that’s "The Night That All Time Broke Out" by Brian W. Aldiss.
And yeah, Brian Aldiss is certainly somebody we’ve talked about often as a reference guy, but also he’s written a lot of science fiction himself.
And the very early 1960s is kind of where he got his start. By 1967, he was around for a little bit, and he gave us this story for "Dangerous Visions".
And I don’t know, it’s fine. I think I want to do an Aldiss story at some point on Chrononauts, and I’m thinking something more substantial, like "The Saliva Tree", which again refers to H. G. Wells.
This is not it. This is just—I don’t know. To me, this is a C story. This is, like, he painted me something that I don’t really care that much about. It doesn’t register with me that much.
Like, it’s kind of cool. It reminded me a little bit of the Murray Leinster story that we did from the pre-Campbell "Astounding" episode.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, there’s one story that I translated from "Más Allá", which we didn’t cover, called "Time Disintegrated", which reminds me of that one, though this one’s a lot better than "Time Disintegrated", I thought.
I think I’d give this one a B. I thought it was fun. I mean, it’s definitely not, like, an all-time masterpiece, but I certainly enjoyed reading it and generally thought it was a good time.
JM:
Yeah, Aldiss is definitely a good writer, but I just—I don’t know. To me, I think he’s capable of much better than this. I don’t really feel much from this.
Like, it’s kind of a domestic situation to start with. It kind of felt like it could have been this really weird episode of "The Twilight Zone", with maybe a higher budget than normal, right, showing just how weird these juxtapositions are and everything like that.
But I don’t know. It didn’t really—as somebody who’s read a little bit of Aldiss and who thinks that he’s kind of cool, his opinions are sometimes like, wow, okay, fine, you believe that. That’s all right. You’re arguing it very strongly. I like him.
But again, sometimes I just feel like here we have an example of a story that I just think could have been a lot more. I don’t know what this story could have been, but I just—I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it, though.
So yeah, again, it’s a C story for me. It’s like a kind of a—it’s kind of a just-there story. I don’t know.
Yeah, I wanted more from Aldiss.
Gretchen:
During my initial reading of the anthology, this was one of the stories that to me felt a little—like, when I would think back on the stories, this one kind of got lost. I would sort of forget about it.
But I reread a few stories and, like, have reconsidered some of them, and I do enjoy the story a little more than I initially did.
I think the concept of these two characters going back in time through time being this tangible thing—that when it’s experienced, they do go back into the past until eventually they’re their ancestors, and then they move further and further back—I think it’s a really interesting concept.
JM:
And yeah, I agree with that.
Gretchen:
At the end, Aldiss says that he had this idea from when he was having drainage work done on his old house in Oxfordshire. And I think this is a really interesting way of looking at how, if any of our modern conveniences suddenly go out, we do get reverted to a previous era or something, and doing that almost literally here.
I think that’s a pretty fun way of looking at that relationship that we have with technology.
And yeah, I also think after "The Malley System" and "A Toy for Juliette" and "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", which were all very gruesome stories, I think this was just, like, a nice little bit of levity.
I think it’s a pretty fun and, like, funny story. So yeah, I thought this was good. I would probably give it a B.
JM:
Cool. Yeah, I don’t know. I do think the idea of using time in this—I don’t know. Oh, we’ve learned to harness time, and now we can show you this, and we can—so long as you pay for your time gas and everything is working properly, right?
It did feel kind of modern because, I don’t know, the way a lot of us think about technology now. My mom just got an Amazon Alexa, and do we really want these things listening all the time? Do we even know what they’re doing?
There are some stories in this anthology, which we’re coming up to, which I think are more connected with that kind of thing. But I think here is just, like, an example of a technology that most people don’t really understand that’s being used in the home, and it’s, like, domestic and everything like that.
How many million things could go wrong? You don’t even know, right? And now, yeah, all time broke out now. So what are you going to do about it? Like, nothing, right? Because you don’t even know how this thing works.
I don’t know. I guess that’s a bit of a dangerous vision, right? Like, I don’t know. It is fine. But again, from Aldiss, I think I would want something a bit more. It didn’t really work for me.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily call this dangerous myself, but we’re going to get to a couple of them that I think aren’t necessarily dangerous, but I still think are pretty interesting stories. And I think this one is one of them.
Nate:
Yeah. It’s not very dangerous. But overall, I enjoyed it, and it was a nice moment of levity. And maybe really the first one that isn’t really trying to be edgy and excessive.
JM:
Right.
